Emory Magazine - Winter 2021

Discovering Molnupiravir

A Day in the Life of Emory

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THE FUTURE STARTS NOW How Emory’s new campaign will transform the world to come through a steadfast commitment to student flourishing, faculty eminence, and research excellence.

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2O36 inspires investment in people for the benefit of people, bringing the Emory community together to build on our mission to serve humanity through knowledge.

With an eye on Emory’s bicentennial, 2O36 will spearhead a movement to radically rethink and reshape the future.

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“There is a balance between idealism and realism, and we tow that line. It’s exciting that we all are at that line and seeing how far it can stretch. Philanthropic support here at Emory is world-changing, because you are telling students that you believe in them, that you believe in their future, that you believe in their ability to affect change.”

—Cat Dymond 20N 21N

“

When there is an important issue, a tough question, I want them to think, “I wonder what’s going on at Emory? I wonder how they’re solving this? I wonder what research is addressing this question?”

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A Day in the Life of Emory From the break of dawn to well into the night, Emory’s campuses bustle with activity. We’ve captured several moments of hard work and focus, as well as fun and beauty, in a typical day of the university.

44 Revolutionary Researchers Take a peek inside the lives and work of some of Emory’s most innovative scientists—and discover their motivations and passions, the struggles they overcame, and how they all share a drive to make the world a better place.

With a Flourish Meet sixteen of Emory’s best and brightest students and find out how the university is helping them flourish by preparing them for a lifelong journey of transformation, contribution, and service.

CONTENTS

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VOL. 96 NO.3

POINTS OF INTEREST 1

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

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DISCOVERING MOLNUPIRAVIR FACULTY FOCUS

CASSANDRA QUAVE: HEART OF BRIGHTNESS

11 SHORT LIST RECENT FACULTY HONORS AND AWARDS 12

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SOCIAL JUSTICE

UNPACKING EMORY’S HISTORY OF SLAVERY AND DISPOSSESSION

EMORY EVERYWHERE 53

40 UNDER FORTY

58

2O36 KICKOFF AND HOMECOMING WEEK

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CLASS NOTES THE BIG PICTURE

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Managing Editor Roger Slavens

Art Director Elizabeth Hautau Karp

Executive Director of Content Jennifer F. Checkner

Creative Director, Publications Peta Westmaas

Contributors Deanna Altomara, Carol Clark, Quinn Eastman, Brian Goebel, Michelle Hiskey, Anya Kasubhai, Tony Rehagen, Kelundra Smith, Rajee Suri, Megan Yang

Photography Kay Hinton Stephen Nowland

Copy Editor Jane Howell Associate Vice President, Creative Dave B. Holston

MORE ONLINE AT EMORY.EDU/MAGAZINE EXPANDED FEATURE DISCOVERING MOLNUPIRAVIR

Read breaking news about the antiviral drug.

VIDEO I AM AN EMORY RESEARCHER

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Watch faculty and student scientists tell their stories.

EXPANDED FEATURE A DAY IN THE LIFE OF EMORY

See more captured moments from our campuses.

Production Manager Stuart Turner Interim VP, Communications and Marketing Cameron Taylor University President Gregory L. Fenves

EMORY MAGAZINE (ISSN 00136727) is published by Emory’s Division of Communications and Marketing. Nonprofit postage paid at 3900 Crown Rd. SE, Atlanta, Georgia, 30304; and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Advancement and Alumni Engagement Office of Data Management, 1762 Clifton Road, Suite 1400, Atlanta, Georgia 30322.

Emory Magazine is distributed free to alumni and friends of the university. Address changes may be emailed to eurec@emory. edu or sent to the Advancement and Alumni Engagement Office of Data Management, 1762 Clifton Road, Suite 1400, Atlanta, Georgia 30322. If you are an individual with a disability and wish to acquire this publication in an alternative format, please contact Roger Slavens (address above).

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The comments and opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of Emory University or the staff of Emory Magazine.

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SPECIAL REPORT

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT

is also about significantly expanding endowed scholarships so that cost doesn’t deny top students the benefits of an Emory education.

Essential to my vision of a university without equal is our extraordinary faculty. Faculty eminence is the very foundation of our future. At Emory, we want an exceptionally talented, diverse faculty who, when given a choice among the very best universities, choose to make Emory their home. But advances in research, teaching, and collaboration require resources. The 2O36 Campaign will enable us to recruit and retain the very best faculty, creating 154 new faculty endowments. For too long at Emory, our faculty endowed positions have been underfunded.

Now is the time to change that trend and invest ambitiously in EYES ON EMORY’S FUTURE President Gregory L. Fenves

world-class talent.

After a year of attracting record-setting research funding—including inspiring breakthroughs in COVID-19 vaccines and treat-

Dear Emory alumni and friends of the university, How do we prepare our incredible students for the challenges of the future? What problems will society call on us to solve?

And how will our outstanding faculty, through their teaching and research, lead at an even higher level?

Last month, we launched a historic fundraising campaign for Emory. Over the next four years of the campaign, we will answer those questions as we shape our future. Named for the year of our two hundredth anniversary, the 2O36 Campaign is about investing in our people who will transform Emory from a great university into one without equal.

It starts with students. Each year, Emory is a top choice for thousands of talented, diverse undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. This campaign is about students not only succeeding, but also flourishing in all aspects of their lives as P H O T O G R A P H Y K AY H I N TO N

thinkers, doers, innovators, and leaders.

What does that mean? In addition to academic achievements, we want students to explore their dreams and realize their potential from the moment they arrive on campus.

That includes extending learning opportunities beyond the classroom, reimagining how we help them prepare for careers, bolstering support for mental health and well-being, and creating opportunities for students to reflect on their purpose and sense of self. Crucial for student flourishing, this campaign

ments—it is clear Emory has the expertise to drive life-changing discoveries with global impact.

We are the university that launched the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, enabling scholars to understand the horrors of slavery and its effects on society today. We are the university that discovered two drugs that revolutionized HIV treatment, improving the lives of millions of people. We are the university that treated the nation’s first Ebola patients. And as humanity faces future challenges, I want Emory to unlock the power of our unique strengths and lead the way in developing solutions. This campaign will support those advances, enabling us to reach new heights of discovery.

If we boldly invest in student flourishing, faculty eminence, and research excellence, Emory will contribute as never before.

And the 2O36 campaign will empower our students, faculty, and staff to accomplish our mission: service to humanity.

With your commitment and generosity, Emory will be a university without equal, in a class of our own. I ask you to get involved. Our alumni bring our bold ambitions to life, and I am excited to imagine all we can accomplish together.

The future at Emory starts now. And it starts with you.

Gregory L. Fenves President Emory University WINTER 2021

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LIFE KEEPS MOVING FORWARD. YOUR CAREER SHOULD TOO. Business is constantly changing. Evolving. Improving. And never done.

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S P E C I A L R E P O R T > > D I SCOVERI NG MOL NUPI R AVI R

MOLNUPIRAVIR The Little Pill That Could

RESEARCHERS AT EMORY DISCOVERED THE ANTIVIRAL DRUG THAT’S POISED TO BE AN IMPORTANT WEAPON IN THE FIGHT AGAINST COVID-19.

By Quinn Eastman In September 2021, Merck Pharmaceuticals announced that molnupiravir, an investigational oral antiviral drug, appeared to significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization or death in patients with mild to

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moderate COVID-19, according to a Phase 3 study. The analysis was conducted by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, which developed the drug after licensing it from Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory (DRIVE). Since then, Merck filed an application with the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for molnupiravir—and the FDA was scheduled to meet November 30 to discuss authorizing it for emergency use in US patients. Meanwhile, Britain’s Medicines & Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency approved molnupiravir, making the drug the first PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF MERCK

antiviral pill to treat COVID-19.

We worked hard for many years to discover and develop molnupiravir to anticipate and address emerging infections.

—George Painter, CEO of DRIVE

Read on to find out how Emory scientist George Painter discovered molnupiravir, a drug originally developed to battle Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and influenza, and sparked investigations of its use against COVID-19.

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LIFE’S WORK Emory’s George Painter, CEO of DRIVE, has spent his career developing antiviral drugs.

RACING FOR A TREATMENT RESEARCHER GEORGE PAINTER LOOMS LARGE AT EMORY IN THE DISCOVERY OF GROUNDBREAKING DRUGS LIKE MOLNUPIRAVIR.

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olnupiravir, a promising potential weapon against COVID-19, was being developed years before the world faced the onslaught of a virus that has killed more than 5 million people in fewer than twenty-four months.

Before the first cases of pneumonia in Wuhan, China, George Painter 72C 73G 77PhD—the CEO of DRIVE (Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory) and the director of the Emory Institute for Drug Discovery (EIDD)—was already working on an antiviral drug that could crush replicating coronaviruses.

And then the stakes jumped sky high in the early weeks of 2020.

“The mortality, the pace of transmission of COVID-19—it’s all playing out in front of your eyes, impacting people’s lives, their jobs, the economy, how the world functions,” Painter says. “It’s a drama you can’t get away from, and that’s the backdrop we have been working against.”

BREAKTHROUGH: LITTLE IS BIG

In November, British regulators approved the use of molnupiravir for at-risk patients with mild to moderate COVID-19, making it the world’s first approved oral medication for SARS-CoV-2.

Merck, which licensed rights to the drug in 2020, had earlier announced that in Phase 3 clinical trials molnupiravir reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by approximately 50 percent, compared to placebo, in patients with mild to moderate 4

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COVID-19. In fact, the trial was halted early because it appeared so promising.

Offering an advantage over antivirals such as remdesivir, molnupiravir can be taken orally as a pill rather than intravenously.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently evaluating Merck’s application for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for this country, which could pave the way for widespread distribution. Word should come soon. The FDA’s Antimicrobial Drugs Advisory Committee will meet on November 30 to discuss the EUA. As Painter awaits the judgment of regulatory authorities in the United States, he allows himself a moment to take it all in.

“It has been an emotional time. I have spent my career as a drug developer, always nose down, getting things done, and I hadn’t even thought about the magnitude of what was happening and the breadth of the impact molnupiravir might have. When it was announced and there was immediate response globally, it was a little overwhelming to tell the truth.”

This pill that has the world talking was originally being developed as a remedy for soldiers against Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus, which had been weaponized during the Cold War. The compound, though, proved to have broader efficacy including activity against highly pathogenic coronaviruses such as the original SARS-CoV and its distant relative, Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) virus.

“Our goal when we started was to discover antiviral agents for influenza and emerging diseases including highly pathogenic coronaviruses,” Painter says.

“Because we were doing that, we were able to quickly redirect our efforts to address COVID-19.”

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S P E C I A L R E P O R T > > D I SCOVERI NG MOL NUPI R AVI R

AN EMORY EDUCATION AND CAREER

While a student at Emory, Painter earned a BS in chemistry, an MS in physical organic chemistry, and a PhD in synthetic chemistry. As the first person in his family to attend college, Painter never imagined that he would someday be developing drug therapies to address some of the world’s most feared diseases.

Yet, at Emory, he was fortunate to swim in waters that would become a who’s who of drug discoverers.

Painter was a senior graduate student when he first met Dennis Liotta, a young chemistry professor at the time, who would discover crucial antiretroviral drugs that have been taken by more than 90 percent of HIV-infected people who are in treatment in the US. Today, Liotta serves as the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Chemistry, a co-founder of DRIVE and executive director of the EIDD. Painter has spent his career developing antiviral drugs. He has served in executive leadership as well as research and development positions at several pharmaceutical companies, including Wellcome and GlaxoWellcome. His record speaks for itself: he has been a co-inventor on more than 120 patents, fourteen of which have led to commercially available drugs or combinations for the treatment of hepatitis B, HIV, and smallpox.

When he weighs this moment against the experience of advancing treatments for HIV, Painter says, “I felt strongly about the HIV days, but this is the highest-impact program I’ve been in. Everything’s supercharged because, frankly, the world was almost on its knees. So, the emotion around it, the intensity, was boiling.”

In 2013, Painter returned to Emory to lead DRIVE, a nonprofit drug development company owned by the university and focused on viral diseases of global

concern. Its unique mission: to be nimble in advancing drug discovery and to operate with the focus and efficiency of an early-stage biotechnology company— except instead of focusing on profit, it would focus on emerging viral diseases that commercial entities were unwilling to address. DRIVE would take advantage of the resources of Emory’s renowned research enterprise while also leveraging industry expertise and, in this way, increase the probability that promising drugs will be sufficiently advanced to be licensed by industry and developed for the ultimate benefit of the public.

THE ORIGIN OF MOLNUPIRAVIR

“The mortality, the pace of transmission of COVID-19—it’s all playing out in front of your eyes, impacting people’s lives, their jobs, the economy, how the world functions. It’s a drama

Responding to a request in 2013 for proposals from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Painter began focusing on screening compounds that could interfere with the replication of Venezuelan equine encephalitis viruses.

Spread by mosquitoes and found primarily in Central and South America, this family of viruses can infect humans and are also considered potential biological weapons. Outbreaks of the related Eastern equine encephalitis virus have been reported recently in the United States, and infections have a high mortality rate.

“We wanted an oral drug because we needed something easily used by a soldier exposed to weaponized virus or something that could be self-administered in the case of a public health emergency,” Painter says.

Among the compounds he and his team identified was a chemical relative of molnupiravir, called N4-hydroxycytidine, or NHC. A ribonucleoside analog, it looks like a building block of RNA—one that could fool the enzyme that replicates RNA viruses’ genetic code and thus be incorporated into their genomes.

Painter and his team unexpectedly discovered that they needed to modify

you can’t get away from, and that’s the backdrop we have been working against.”

—George Painter

NHC so that it could be absorbed readily in the intestine, thus in part leading to the creation of molnupiravir. At that point, as a lab designation, NHC was called EIDD-1931, while molnupiravir was termed EIDD-2801.

Painter and the team thought EIDD-1931 and EIDD-2801 might be active against other RNA viruses such as chikungunya, a growing problem in Florida and Texas, as well as influenza. Flu was considered the biggest potential infectious disease threat, especially if a strain emerged from birds or pigs that escaped most people’s existing immunity.

“We found that the compound was active against a number of viruses in a

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S P E C I A L R E P O R T > > D I SCOVERI NG MOL NUPI R AVI R

FROM FLU TO COVID-19

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, intrigued by the promise of EIDD-2801 against influenza, awarded the EIDD a contract in 2019 to deepen their study. At the time, Painter and DRIVE were busy assembling the data that would advance the drug sufficiently to transfer to industry and support the submission of an Investigational New Drug application to the FDA, a step that is required to allow clinical trials to begin.

Along the way, Painter asked some of the world’s top virologists to confirm his team’s initial findings. DRIVE provided EIDD-2801 to virologists who specialized in various RNA viruses, including Mark Denison at Vanderbilt University, Richard Plemper at Georgia State University, and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina. These labs worked to successfully confirm Emory’s initial findings, including that EIDD-2801 blunts disease severity and suppresses viral spread on animal models with influenza infection, 6

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IMPORTANT OPPORTUNITY Painter says that molnupiravir is a direct intervention at a time when people had become weary of COVID-19. He is overwhelmed by this chance to intercede and make a difference.

further building the case for the drug’s potential to fight the flu.

By November 2019, it was confirmed that the compound was effective against another coronavirus, MERS. When the pandemic began, Painter says he and the EIDD team believed EIDD-2801 would work against SARS-CoV-2, and they began directly testing it against the virus.

“It was very potent,” Painter says. “We asked our collaborators to test the drug in animal models with SARS-CoV-2 and they found it to be very effective. At that point, I thought, ‘OK, there is the distinct possibility that this will make a big difference in the emerging pandemic.’ ” These are unusually upbeat words from Painter, who through trial and error has learned to hold back hope until the science is decisive. As he says, “I’ve spent my life doing drug development, and one of the things that’s happened to me is I never celebrate too early.”

STARTING HUMAN TRIALS

As COVID-19 began rapidly spreading around the world, Painter and DRIVE chief operating officer David Perryman were locking down the strategy and

WINTER 2021

looking for industrial partners who might be able to move the drug rapidly into clinical trials to address the growing pandemic. Emory’s government contract was geared toward influenza, and both Painter and Perryman understood that a private company might be able to act more quickly with a coronavirus.

“The big issue was time,” Painter says.

In January 2020, Painter met Wendy Holman, CEO and co-founder of the company Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.

Their initial discussions were not about coronaviruses; however, she and her husband, Wayne Holman, had experience developing an antibody against Ebola and were eager to contribute to the fight against COVID-19.

A decisive moment had arrived: COVID-19 was a test of DRIVE’s model for how to bridge university and industry research to address rapidly emerging infections that would ultimately benefit patients.

With the extensive data on the activity of the drug in animal models with viral diseases that Emory scientists and DRIVE’s collaborators accumulated, Ridgeback was able to obtain FDA

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lot of different families,” Painter says.

“That is a rather unique property of ribonucleoside analogs and actually fortuitous given the number of threats RNA viruses pose to public health.”

Another attractive feature of ribonucleoside analogs: viruses have difficulty developing resistance to them and so would potentially be less able to mutate into more dangerous variants.

The active form of molnupiravir, NHC, works by tricking the enzymatic machine that copies the virus’s RNA genome into making errors. Unlike remdesivir, Gilead’s COVID-19 drug, it does not stop the machine in its tracks.

Instead, when enough errors accumulate in viral RNA, the virus can’t replicate efficiently.

“The virus loses its ability to infect and cause damage,” Painter says.

approval for Phase 1 testing in humans. Knowing they were racing against a deadly virus, DRIVE and Ridgeback moved quickly to announce a collaboration in March 2020 to move EIDD-2801 into clinical trials, with Ridgeback licensing the technology from DRIVE. “What happened with molnupiravir shows the strength of our system,” Painter says. “The federal government funded us initially. We worked hard for many years to discover and develop molnupiravir to anticipate and address emerging infections. In the face of the pandemic, we moved the drug quickly into the hands of biotech, and it quickly got through Phase 1.”

In short order, Ridgeback organized and funded an initial study of healthy volunteers in the United Kingdom, which

showed that the drug was safe, with few adverse events reported. Ridgeback then organized and funded a doubleblind, placebo-controlled Phase 2 clinical trial testing the drug in American outpatients with COVID-19 symptoms.

In spring 2021, the results were announced: the drug could eliminate coronavirus from patients who received it within five days.

Having brought molnupiravir to this point, Painter reflects on the virus, the national climate, and what it has meant to have a horse in this race. “These are people’s lives,” he notes, “and molnupiravir is a direct intervention at a time when people are weary and there is a lot of frailty in our infrastructure. So, when I think about our ability to intercede and make a difference, it’s overwhelming.”

REFUELING FOR THE WORK AHEAD

NAMING THE DRUG The name “molnupiravir” came out of a conversation between Painter and Wayne Holman. Painter had been musing about a story called The Hammer of God from science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke that

PHOTOGRAPHY GETTY IMAGES

described the impending collision of the Earth with an asteroid. Holman turned the phrase around, thinking of the Marvel Studios movies his children enjoyed, featuring the Norse god Thor. In Norse legend, Mjölnir was the hammer Thor used to smite the serpent that encircled the world.

Painter is one half of a husband-wife drug-development team educated at Emory. While she was working in Dennis Liotta’s lab, Painter met Gwendolyn (Wendy) Powell, who was pursuing a master’s in organic chemistry.

Wendy Powell Painter 77C 77G, a physician with extensive experience in drug development, now works at Ridgeback as chief medical officer, overseeing the development of molnupiravir.

The Painters average five to six hours of sleep a night. It is not an exaggeration to say that, for now, the work owns them.

“I always wake up thinking about this,” he admits. “And if I don’t, Wendy does.”

The Painters, who have three children, say the workload of the past year and a half has made them closer. “The good news is that we are in it together,” he says. “It helps that you don’t have to come home and explain why you’re staring into space.”

His mind races ahead to other potential challenges. “At my heart, I’m a scientist. To me, it’s fascinating, very captivating,” Painter adds. “But you can’t help but ask, ‘What happens when the next one comes along?’ ”

WHAT’S NEXT IN DRUG DISCOVERY?

Preparation is the key. Painter and his colleagues are already working on Lassa fever, a viral disease that is endemic in West Africa, is transmitted by rats, and infects hundreds of thousands of people each year, as well as many other potential pandemic threats.

“We actually have a new lead molecule that treats very bad arenaviruses, things like Lassa fever,” he says. “It’s active against a lot of other hemorrhagic fevers, which is a big unmet medical need in a large part of the world.”­

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The Heart of Brightness Emory researcher and alumna Cassandra Quave—aka ‘The Plant Hunter’—takes readers on a quest for nature’s

A LIFE WORTH READING ABOUT A medical ethnobotanist, Cassandra Quave has overcome personal hurdles to excel in her field and help humanity by discovering remedies in nature.

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assandra Quave’s 00C life is like a tropical forest: Varied, colorful, bursting with life, and laced with hidden paths that must be constantly cleared to move along them.

Her new memoir—titled The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines—guides readers through a world of plants and the people entwined with them. The story is sometimes dark but mostly uplifting, lit up by her personal revelations and scientific discoveries.

Quave’s story begins with a spirited childhood in rural Florida. It’s marked by dozens of surgeries and chronic pain, but also volunteer work in a hospital and joyful explorations of nature. It moves on to her pivotal years as an Emory undergrad, winds through the Amazon and little-known environments of the Balkans and Italy, graduate school, postdoctoral training, marriage, and children. Quave is now back at Emory where she is curator of the Emory Herbarium and an associate professor at the Center for the Study of Human Health and the School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology.

“I was inspired to write the book because people have found my work interesting,” says Quave (her last name rhymes with “wave”). “It’s a chance to tell the larger story of my life, bringing 8

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together all the different parts of it.”

As a medical ethnobotanist, she studies how people survive when they have few resources other than what is available to them in their immediate environment.

Quave follows clues hidden in ancient plant remedies to search for new compounds to combat the modern-day scourge of antibiotic-resistant infections. She holds six patents, is a fellow of the Explorer’s Club, and a past president of the Society for Economic Botany.

Even at her home near Emory, Quave is immersed in plants. She wears a dress printed with lemons as she gives a tour of her terraced garden: Tomatoes,

Hungarian peppers, and okra grow amid chives, lemongrass, and Thai holy basil.

Mint scents the air as she crushes peppermint leaves in her fingers and explains how they have soothed stomachaches for centuries.

She points out motherwort (sipped in a tea to ease the anxiety of childbirth) and cone flowers (the roots are pounded into a tincture for cold symptoms).

She breaks off a sprig of celandine, a member of the poppy family, and a bright orange resin oozes out. “The resin is toxic in the wrong doses, but it’s also a traditional remedy applied to warts,” Quave says.

Quave scours historical documents and interviews

P H O T O G R A P H Y A N N WAT S O N

next medicines in her newly published memoir.

P H O T O G R A P H Y A N N WAT S O N , C O U R T E SY O F CA S S A N D R A Q UAV E , A L E S S A N D R O S A I T TA

traditional healers as a first step in her search for medically important plant compounds. These include extracts from the berries of the Brazilian peppertree and the leaves of the European chestnut tree that disarm dangerous antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria— discoveries that have been covered by major media around the globe.

Her home office is a sunroom lush with philodendrons, parlor palms, and hanging pots of ferns. She settles onto her living room sofa and stretches out her legs. One of them is made of metal.

The artificial limb is encased in a colorful plastic cover, etched with sprigs of plants and scientific symbols. “I got really tired of having a prosthetic covered in plastic skin,” Quave says. “When people see something fake that’s trying to look like a real leg it confuses them and they tend to stare more. I don’t like pretending to be something that I’m not.”

One goal of her memoir, Quave says, is to provide the kind of role model she herself lacked. “A lot of amputee kids may want to become a scientist or an explorer or an adventurer,” Quave says.

“I write about disability from a really honest perspective—the chronic pain and the challenges but also learning how to assess a problem and remove hurdles, whatever your limitations.”

part of creating arable land for agricultural use, Quave explains.

At the age of twenty, in 1969, her father joined the US Army’s First Infantry Division. He was sent to Vietnam, where he trudged over landscapes recently defoliated by dioxin. Also known as Agent Orange, dioxin is a powerful herbicide that the US military sprayed to eliminate forest cover while fighting the Vietcong.

Her father’s exposure to the herbicide may have led to Quave’s multiple skeletal birth defects, including the absence of part of her right calf bone, Quave writes in her memoir. When she was three, her right leg was amputated below the knee to improve her mobility. That surgery led to a life-threatening staph infection in the toddler. Her leg had to be cut off even shorter, leaving her with a heavily scarred stump that

lacks fatty tissue, making prosthetics less comfortable.

Despite this rough start, Quave thrived as a child. She and her younger sister loved running wild in their natural surroundings. “Florida is an amazing place,” she says, “and I was raised to have a strong connection to the land.”

Her father tacked boards to the trunk of a centuries-old live oak in their back yard so she could climb up it to read, reflect, and observe the life forms proliferating on the tree. Tiny orchids sprouted from the bark, and the delicate green fronds of resurrection ferns curled around branches bearded in Spanish moss.

In elementary school she began developing award-winning science fair projects—such as putting a drop of pond water beneath a microscope and

A LIFE AMONG NATURE (left) Quave joined Emory’s faculty in 2013. (top right) Quave rides her horse Sequoia in 1993. (bottom right) Plants have been central to Quave’s career.

SPARKING HER LIFE’S PURPOSE Quave has been removing hurdles since she was born in the small town of Arcadia, in rural South Florida.

Her grandfather, father, and uncles worked as land clearers, known as “stumpers.” When colossal longleaf pines in the South were felled for timber to build homes, they used bulldozers to push the remaining stumps out of the ground. They then blew them up with dynamite for grinding at a stump mill to extract turpentine and other by-products.

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P O I N T S O F I N T E R E S T > > FAC ULT Y FOC U S

drawing the creatures she saw living in it. Meanwhile, dozens of surgeries, including the need to correct her hip dysplasia and scoliosis of her spine, sparked Quave’s interest in medicine. She began volunteering at a local hospital while still in her teens, working directly with patients as well as in the lab.

DISCOVERING A NEW PATH AT EMORY She planned to become a doctor and follow in the footsteps of her pediatric orthopedist, Chad Price 67C, who also happens to be an Emory alum. As an Emory undergraduate, however, majoring in biology and anthropology, new paths beckoned to Quave.

In a class taught by Peter Brown, professor of anthropology, she learned that in some cultures, disabled people are venerated and believed to have special powers. In others, however, they have been left to die. “It made me realize how fortunate I am to have been born in a country with access to health care,” Quave says. “I wondered what would have happened if I had been a child in a village without running water and electricity.

I wouldn’t have been able to walk. What would my life had been like?”

In a seminar taught by Michelle Lampl, now director of the Emory Center for the Study of Human Health, she discovered her love for research. “She challenged us to look at primary literature and dissect those papers,” Quave says. “I learned how to evaluate evidence.”

Larry Wilson, an instructor in the Department of Environmental Sciences, sparked her interest in tropical ecology and ethnobotany. Wilson organized an annual student trip to the Peruvian Amazon, and Quave was determined to go even though she couldn’t afford it. Wilson helped her find a way, arranging for a student work-study project at the site.

An Amazon traditional healer named Don Antonio took the young Quave under his wing. “He held a rich knowledge of the 10

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medicinal properties of plants that he shared with me,” she says, “from the use of the latex from fig trees to treat intestinal parasites to the red resin of the dragon’s blood tree to treat wounds and diarrhea.”

Quave investigated how reliance on modern medicine caused local healers to stop passing on some helpful traditional practices, leaving a chasm when the stocks of modern medicines ran out. “Ideally we should combine the best of both modern and traditional medicine,” she says. “Some of the best modern-day drugs, including those for cancer and pain, have been derived from plants.”

Months later, Quave opened up her long-awaited acceptance letter from a medical school. “I realized that instead of practicing medicine as a physician, I wanted to discover and develop new medicines inspired by nature,” she says. “I found the courage to crumple that letter in my hand and took another, less-traveled path.”

WIFE, MOTHER, TEACHER, EXPLORER While doing field work in Southern Italy, she met her match in Marco Caputo, a native of the small town of Ginestra. Like Quave, Caputo spent much of his childhood outdoors, exploring a rural landscape of creeks, waterfalls, and fields full of fragrant, yellow ginestra flowers. In her book, Quave describes their storybook courtship, including a balcony scene, and their wedding in a thirteenth-century castle.

The couple now have four children: Trevor (seventeen), Donato (sixteen), Issabella (fourteen), and Giacamo (eight).

After graduate school and a postdoctoral fellowship, Quave came full circle when she returned to Emory in 2011, initially as a postdoc and then as a faculty member in 2013. Her lab draws on the myriad resources spanning the university, from the Center for the Study of Human Health; to the Antibiotic-Resistance Center, the School of Medicine, Rollins School of Public Health, and the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library; to the social and physical sciences of Emory College.

P H O T O G R A P H Y C O U R T E SY O F CA S S A N D R A Q UAV E , A N N WAT S O N

FIELD WORK (above) Quave introduced her students to a Florida ecosystem during a 2016 trip. (right) Collecting and cataloging plants.

SHORT LIST

P H O T O G R A P H Y K AY H I N TO N

“I relished the chance to return to a broad, liberal arts university with a strong medical and public health component,” Quave says. “I love talking daily to leading scholars from different fields and being close to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

The caliber of Emory undergraduates was another draw. More than one hundred undergraduates have trained in her lab, which has published more than one hundred articles, many of them written by undergraduates.

Quave is thrilled by the career successes of former lab members—from jobs in medicine to pharmacology research to biotech start-ups. But she’s also committed to cultivating her students’ awareness and appreciation of plants.

“I try to give my students the tools to make more informed decisions about how they live their lives,” Quave says. “Their choices affect both their own health as well as that of the planet.”—Carol Clark

The Plant Hunter: A Scientist’s Quest for Nature’s Next Medicines by Cassandra Quave, published in October 2021, is available through most major booksellers.

TRACTOR BEAM FOR TUMORS Ravi Bellamkonda, Emory University provost and biomedical scientist, has received the National Institutes of Health Director’s Transformative Research Award for his crosscutting work using electrical fields to treat a particularly aggressive pediatric cancer. Bellamkonda’s five-year grant supports a project to use low-voltage electrical fields to induce cancer cells to migrate out of the tissues they have invaded: a strategy he calls a “tumor tractor beam.” The approach could be particularly valuable for diffuse cancers, indicating that the malignant growth has spread to multiple areas of an organ or the body. Bellamkonda’s team will test the strategy with a type of pediatric tumor called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG); this tumor arises in the brainstem and is not amenable to surgery. Early work on this concept was supported by Ian’s Friends Foundation, an Atlanta-based foundation whose mission is to find cures for pediatric brain tumors. The team includes Tobey MacDonald from Emory Pediatrics and Nassir Mokarram from Emory Neurosurgery, Warren Grill from Duke Biomedical Engineering, and Johnathan Lyon 17PhD, who led this project as a graduate student and scientist in the Bellamkonda lab.

SCIENCE MEETS SOCIAL JUSTICE Emory physician-scientist Colleen Kelley was awarded the HIV Medicine Association’s 2021 Award for Excellence in HIV Research. Kelley’s work focuses on the spread of HIV and sexually transmitted infections among sexual and gender minorities, as well as disparities in HIV prevention and intervention uptake. In announcing the award, the HIV Medicine Association said Kelley “has a deep understanding of laboratory-based research, clinical trials, and epidemiologic research and has been a tireless champion for underserved populations in both clinical care and research participation.”

THEORETICAL INVESTIGATIONS The Simons Foundation has named Ilya Nemenman one of its 2021 Simons Investigators, among the most prestigious awards for a theoretical research scientist. The Emory College of Arts and Sciences professor of physics and biology has been instrumental in helping Emory become a global research leader in theoretical and modeling approaches to living systems. The recognition for Nemenman, a pioneer in developing theories to model and make quantitatively precise predictions of biological information processing systems, comes with $100,000 annually for five years. The award allows him to add postdoctoral researchers and students to Emory’s highly collaborative Theory and Modeling of Living Systems initiative.

HEALTH CARE INNOVATORS This fall, two Emory researchers received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award that supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators. Chethan Pandarinath, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, received the award for using brain-machine interfaces to help restore critical functions like communications to paralyzed patients, including those with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Candace Fleischer, assistant professor of radiology and imaging sciences, received the award for her proposal to use magnetic resonance imaging in new ways to study metabolic disease. Pandarinath and Fleischer each received a $1.5 million grant to pursue their research over a five-year period.

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UNPACKING EMORY'S HISTORY OF

SLAVERY AND DISPOSSESSION

BY KELUNDRA SMITH

A

vis Williams 78Ox 98C 08T 18T never considered going to Oxford College of Emory University. Though she grew up

nearby, she didn’t think she would be welcome there, even

not 1976,” says Williams. She recognized that humor might be an effective means to get her point across.

The next time Williams had a shift in the library, her grand-

with grades in the top 1 percent of her class. But when she was

mother’s friend was eating lunch in the employee break room.

attend. When she arrived on campus, her work-study assignment

says Williams.

admitted with a scholarship, her grandmother insisted that she was in the library.

It was 1976. Although school desegregation had been the

national law for more than twenty years and Emory had graduated its first African American students in 1963, there were still few

Black or other students of color at the university. Williams was re-

lieved to see a familiar face in the library; her grandmother’s friend was a custodial worker there.

She recalls inviting the woman to have lunch with her in

“She said to me, ‘I don’t know what you did, but thank you,’ ” That lunch incident is but one in a series of injustices that

mark Emory University’s history. As a member of the Universities Studying Slavery Consortium, the university is committed to un-

packing its participation in acts of prejudice and discrimination so Emory can pave a new path forward, one characterized by unity

and equity. This requires going all the way back to the early nineteenth century before the original campus at Oxford was built.

the employee break room. Her grandmother’s friend refused,

THE ORIGINAL SIN

Williams watched as a woman she’d known her entire life ate her

and Oxford campuses now sit as a result of the 1821 Treaty

saying that custodial workers were not allowed to eat in that area.

The state of Georgia acquired the land where Emory’s Atlanta

lunch in the mop closet. There was no formal policy that Black

of Indian Springs. This treaty was one in a decades-long

custodial staff could not eat in the break area, but there was an unspoken understanding that they were not welcome. For Williams, this simply would not do.

“I approached my supervisor, and I said that I thought the

woman might be senile because she thought it was 1866 and 12

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attempt to move the Muscogee (Creek) Indians off their land in Georgia and Alabama. Like previous treaties, the tribes

agreed begrudgingly and under duress. By that time, the Muscogee had already ceded millions of acres due to threats of war by white settlers.

PH O T O G R A PH Y E M O RY U N I V E R S I T Y A R C H I V E S , K AY H I N TO N , L I B R A RY O F C O N G R E S S , A N D P E R S O N A L C O N T R I B U T I O N S F R O M M A R S H A H O U S TO N , AV I S W I L L I A M S , A N D A N D E R S O N W R I G H T.

SOBERING VIEW This partial panorama of Oxford College from the 1890s includes Phi Gamma Hall, which is believed to have been erected by enslaved people.

However, the US government and

tion that funds the maintenance of the

on even more territory between the Mus-

all burial plots. This work led Auslander

the state of Georgia still had their eyes

cogee and Cherokee. The tribes refused to give up that land and resisted moving west. Then, in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal

grounds, agreed to equitable upkeep of to interview descendants of people who

were believed to be enslaved by Emory’s early faculty members and trustees.

“I was told by elders in the Black

Act, which gave the War Department

community that to understand issues

ing Indians west of the Mississippi River.

to resources, etc., you had to look at the

resources to forcibly move any remain-

Most of them died on what is now called the Trail of Tears.

“The primary driver behind this

dispossession was the desire to expand slavery, especially because in Virginia

several generations of overtilling the soil

such as voting rights, unequal access

cemetery,” says Auslander, who is now

a visiting scholar at Brandeis University

and a visiting faculty member at Boston University and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“I started to see a whole story that

made it less productive,” says Malinda

had been hiding in the light about how

Professor of American History in Emory

the institution. They were getting vital

Maynor Lowery, the Cahoon Family

College. Lowery studies the Lumbee Indians in North Carolina and Indian

removal policies. “They wanted to figure out how to expand their most profitable

enterprise, which was buying and selling human beings.”

By 1836, the Methodist church re-

ceived a charter from the state of Geor-

gia to build a new liberal arts college. Two years later, the church broke ground on the first building in Oxford, Georgia. It is

believed that enslaved people were used to erect Few Hall and Phi Gamma Hall.

This history is detailed in The Acci-

dental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of

Race and Finding an American Family by Mark Auslander, who taught at both the Oxford and Atlanta campuses.

Fast forward more than one hun-

dred and sixty years. At the turn of

twenty-first century, Oxford residents

were at odds with the city council over inequitable upkeep of the segregated

Oxford Cemetery. The African American

section was overgrown, so Auslander, his

students, and local congregations began a restoration project. In 2001, Oxford

City Council and the cemetery founda-

essential slavery was to the founding of tuition money from the sons of Caribbean and Southern plantation owners. . . . I was curious as to what this experience was like for the African Americans who were living at this time.”

Though there are no records that the

ONCE-NATIVE LANDS Georgia land cessions map shows treaties with Native American tribes.

regret and acknowledged some of the

descendants of the enslaved. Caldwell

and her sister, Cynthia Martin, were given

university ever owned any slaves, “Kitty’s

a quilt made by artist Lynn Linnemeier

of Emory’s entanglement with the

The university also built a new headstone

Boyd, sometimes called “Miss Kitty,”

of color buried in the white section of

Cottage” in Oxford stands as evidence

called “Miss Kitty’s Cloak” in her honor.

institution of slavery. Catherine Andrew

for Boyd, who is the only known person

was enslaved by the president of the

Oxford Cemetery.

Emory College Board of Trustees, Bishop

“I’m grateful to Emory, and I’m glad

James O. Andrew.

Emory is making the steps to do some-

than a symbol, and preserving the dignity

people education and jobs, and address-

For Boyd’s descendants, she is more

of her legacy is a must.

“When Mark Auslander called in

2009, I was gobsmacked,” says Darcel Caldwell, one of Boyd’s great-great-

great granddaughters. “When we came

thing,” says Caldwell. “Slavery denied ing those issues would be one of the

many ways Emory could atone. I think

Emory can set an excellent example in that regard.”

Last year, Emory President Gregory

down for the [Slavery and the University]

L. Fenves announced the creation of the

munity was very generous and loving to

scholarships for two undergraduate

conference in 2011, the Oxford com-

my sister and me. They accepted us like long-lost children.”

Before the conference, the Emory

Board of Trustees issued a statement of

Descendants Endowment to provide

students each year who are descended

from enslaved people with ties to Emory University. The first scholarships are

anticipated to be offered for fall 2022.

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P O I N T S O F I N T E R E S T > > SOC I AL J U ST I C E

scaper there, and his grandmother did

laundry for students and faculty. In 1952,

of one of the first integrated classes

worked in the cafeteria at Oxford wash-

arrived on campus, she did not expect

while he was in high school, Wright

ing dishes and made $0.45 an hour.

According to the US Census, the

average household income in 1952 was $2,300 per year. Wright recalls

full-time cafeteria employees at Emory

making $17 per week, or closer to $884 annually. Seeing the limited opportuni-

ties for people in his community, Wright

enlisted in the US Navy after high school and worked at the US Postal Service in California for most of his career.

“Growing up, it was so many young

people that would have wanted to go to college there, but weren’t allowed to,”

says Wright, who is now vice president of the Oxford Historic Cemetery Founda-

tion. “I probably would have been one of them.”

BURIED TRUTHS Catherine “Miss Kitty” Andrew Boyd is the only known African American buried in the white section of Oxford Cemetery. (top) Kitty’s Cottage on Oxford Campus, present day. (bottom) In 2011, Emory unveiled a new headstone for Boyd.

The Descendants Endowment is a

step toward addressing one aspect of

Emory’s history, but the university impact goes beyond the Quad.

Though African Americans worked

at the university from its founding, the

first Black students were not admitted to Emory University until the 1960s. Brown v. Board of Education integrated public

schools, but the state of Georgia maintained segregation in private schools.

They threatened a significant tax penalty for schools that admitted non-white students.

Henry L. Bowden, the university’s

general counsel as well as board chair-

CHANGE COMES SLOWLY After Emancipation and the turn of the

century, inequitable treatment of certain groups continued. In 1919, the college expanded to Atlanta where plantations

once stood. Auslander believes that de-

man at the time, and Ben F. Johnson

Jr., dean of the School of Law, took the

College. His grandfather was a land14

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recalls that during her sophomore year in McTyeire Hall a group of white male

students draped in white sheets burned a cross beneath her window. The inci-

dent is jauntily documented in the 1967 yearbook.

“At the time, I don’t think there was a

single predominantly white school that

knew what to do to create a welcoming environment for Black students,” says Houston. “The only Black people on

campus were grounds people, cafeteria workers, and custodians. If you had an academic or psychological problem, there was no one to talk to.”

Houston eventually found a place

to belong in the performing arts. Her

senior year, she collaborated with fellow

students to produce Langston Hughes’s

Montage of a Dream Deferred. The event was a fundraiser for what they hoped

would become a Martin Luther King Jr. scholarship. Alumni, faculty, staff, and

students continued fundraising for many years. Today, Emory College awards the Martin Luther King, Jr.–Woodruff Scholarship every year to incoming students

who graduate from a public high school in the city of Atlanta.

Alliance protested on the steps of Can-

Verdelle Bellamy 63N and Allie Saxon

they each earned a master’s degree in

Oxford or Emory but grew up near Oxford

not prepared for social isolation. She

fied students without penalty.

won—allowing Emory to admit all quali-

both campuses.

African American who never attended

to see many brown faces, but she was

A LEGACY OF STUDENT ACTIVISM

63N were the first two African American

That includes Anderson Wright, an

that enrolled in fall 1964. When she

case to the Georgia Supreme Court and

scendants of formerly enslaved people

were paid substandard wages to work on

Marsha Houston 68C was a part

students to graduate from Emory, when

nursing in 1963. Charles Dudley 67C was the first African American undergraduate admitted to Emory College, and he graduated with a degree in history in 1967.

WINTER 2021

In 1969, the newly formed Black Student dler Library for four days. The year before the protest, African American students sent a list of eight areas of concern to

then President Sanford Atwood. A year later they had not seen action.

On the list, they addressed working

conditions for Black employees, admis-

sion policies, diversifying the curriculum

by establishing a Black Studies program,

journey to realize a more equitable, di-

Emory University President Claire E.

cultural space.

says. “That means taking a hard look at

Bride created the Task Force on Untold

and the need for a permanent Black

Wages and work conditions for Black

employees in the Cox Hall cafeteria

were of particular concern. One Sun-

day afternoon, Black students stood in

front of the entrance and food lines with memos stating that Emory discourages

verse, and inclusive Emory,” Henderson some painful and disturbing truths about a history whose remnants can still be

felt today. We, as an institution, must be courageous in acknowledging and dis-

mantling systemic barriers of exclusion, inequity, and inhumaneness at all levels

Sterk and former Provost Dwight A. McStories and Disenfranchised Populations in 2019 following the resurfacing of dis-

turbing images in Emory yearbooks, such as the one of a burning cross outside of Marsha Houston’s dormitory.

When Fenves started in 2020, he

of the institution.”

recharged the committee and expanded

raise over them.” The school requested

change agents have led the way. Their

ory’s founding narratives. As a result of

The protests ended with faculty and

welcomed in this work as they hold us

Black employees from advocating for better wages by “holding a two-cent

a restraining order against the students. administration agreeing to most of the student demands.

That included the hiring of Delores P.

Aldridge in 1971. Aldridge was the first

African American to hold a tenure-track

position in the college, and she became

the founding director of the Department of African American Studies.

In 1990, 2015, and 2020, Black

students at Emory University stood on

the shoulders of those who came before

She adds: Our students and other

presence and resolute energy are

accountable to realize real change.”

their scope to include reevaluating Emthat committee’s work, the university is

commissioning twin memorials to “honor those enslaved persons with ties to Emory and Indigenous peoples on whose

THE WAY FORWARD In recent years, the university has also established several working groups to

tackle Emory’s complex history. Former

land Emory’s campus was erected.”

That same year, Fenves appointed

the University Committee on Naming

Honors. In May 2021, that committee

BRAVE FACES (top) Marsha Houston in an after-class discussion about race on campus with Jack Boozer, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Religion, and others in 1968; (below left) Anderson Wright, present day, vice president of the Oxford Historic Cemetery Foundation; (below right) Avis Williams, present day, sits on a bench near her old residence hall at Oxford.

and continued to issue lists of demands to administrators to address racial and social justice issues on campus. The

2020 list includes a range of items from ongoing sensitivity training for faculty and administrators to disarming and

defunding campus police. Some of the items on the list mirrored what Black

students asked for fifty years earlier, in-

cluding “the protection and preservation of designated Black spaces.”

Student protests helped spark the

university’s hiring of Carol Henderson

to be the first chief diversity officer and

vice provost in 2019. Henderson’s office

is tasked with making sure that all faculty, staff, students, and job applicants are

protected from discrimination based on

race, gender, sexual orientation, or belief.

“The institutional work I help to

lead—with many campus partners

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P O I N T S O F I N T E R E S T > > SOC I AL J U ST I C E

recommended that Emory discontin-

She earned the Emory Medal in

came to Emory, she found herself longing for a sense of community.

ue the conferral of naming honors for

2010. She died in 2020, and the Twilla

George Foster Pierce, Augustus Baldwin

established in her honor.

cousins going to Emory because of the

the Emory Native American Initiative is

edgment,” says Talavera-Brown, a Dine

Atticus Greene Haygood, L.Q.C. Lamar, Longstreet, and Robert Yerkes.

Thus far, the Longstreet-Means

residence hall, which was named after

Emory’s second president (1839–1848), has been renamed Eagle Hall. The chair named for him in the Department of

Haynes Faculty Award Fund has been

In addition to trailblazers like Haynes,

meant to encourage more Indigenous

students to apply for admission to the university.

Students such as junior Sierra Tala-

English has been renamed as the Emory

vera-Brown 23C want to create a stron-

guished Professor of English.

students on campus. Talavera-Brown,

College of Arts and Sciences Distin-

These recommendations are based,

in part, on Longstreet’s strong defense of slavery while he served as Emory president.

In addition, Language Hall at

Oxford College was renamed in honor of Horace J. Johnson Jr. 77Ox 79B.

Johnson went on to become the first

Black superior court judge in the Alcovy

ger sense of belonging for Indigenous

who is a human biology and anthropolo-

woman and a member of the Navajo Na-

tion. “The impostor syndrome and feeling like you’re not good enough. . . . I grew up having to do that.” She and others are

working to create the first organization

for Indigenous students in Emory University’s history.

This fall, Fenves announced that

the Board of Trustees has approved an

predominantly white schools. When she

ognizes “the Muscogee (Creek) people

cut, where she often felt isolated in her

official land acknowledgment that rec-

A TIME FOR PROTEST Following the killings of unarmed Black people by police, Emory students staged a “die-in” protest in 2014; Students protest at Cox Hall in 1969 over concerns of inequitable wages for dietary staff employees.

Progress for Native American and

Indigenous students has been slower. Emory currently has twenty-four

students who self-identify as American Indian/Alaska Native, four faculty and

staff members, and just over two hundred alumni.

One of those graduates was Twilla

Haynes 80N, a member of the Lumbee

tribe. In 1980, she became the first Na-

tive American to earn a master’s degree

from the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. Later in that decade, she

also became the nursing school’s first Native American faculty member.

Her daughters Hope Haynes Bus-

senius 93N and Angela Haynes Ferere 91PH 98N 09N also earned nursing

degrees from Emory and teach here today. Together, they started Hope

Haven Orphanage and Eternal Hope in

Haiti. During the summers, Haynes took Emory students abroad to learn and practice skills there.

EMORY MAGAZINE

social exclusion and lack of acknowl-

gy major, grew up in Guilford, Connecti-

Judicial Circuit.

16

“It’s hard to imagine some of my

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A SYMPOSIUM ON RACISM AND RESTORATIVE JUSTICE Among many universities across the country that have been researching their connections to slave labor and Indigenous dispossession, Emory hosted a symposium to examine its legacy of racism and start dialogues with students, faculty, staff, and the community on how the institution can further restorative justice.

THEN AND NOW (top) A 1925 aerial view of original buildings on Emory University’s Oxford campus constructed by enslaved people. (bottom) Oxford College of Emory University, present day.

who lived, worked, produced knowl-

as co-chair of the Language Path

Emory’s Oxford and Atlanta campuses

has had such a long history of edu-

edge on, and nurtured the land where are now located” and “the sustained

oppression, land dispossession, and

involuntary removals of the Muscogee and Cherokee peoples from Georgia

working group. “The Muscogee Nation cation on this land. Knowledge is not something you hoard, it’s something you share.”

the goal is to create a greater sense of

mation of a working group to advance

campus.

plans for the development of an

belonging for everyone who arrives on “I am inspired by the engaged

outdoor Language Path on the Emory

Emory faculty, staff, students, and

(Creek) Nation and highlight the Mus-

our institution accountable,” says

campuses to honor the Muscogee cogee language and culture.

“I think our ancestors would be

proud of the work that we are doing

now,” says Lowery, who helped write the acknowledgment and will serve

You can view full recordings of the sessions led by leading scholars on slavery and dispossession, Emory student activists, artists and musicians, and descendants of enslaved people at youtube.com/emoryuniversity. Click on the playlist tab to scroll through all the sessions.

As Emory looks toward the future,

and the Southeast.”

Fenves also announced the for-

Held September 29 through October 1 on both the Emory and Oxford campuses, the symposium called “In the Wake of Slavery and Dispossession,” featured a wide range of panel discussions, open conversations, and creative interpretations to capture the perspectives of Black, Native American, and Indigenous peoples.

alumni who have the courage to hold Fenves, “and lead us in telling a more

complete story about where we have

been and who we are so we can build a more equitable, diverse, inclusive, and vibrant university.”

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THE FUTURE STARTS NOW

wIth a FL URISH Meet sixteen of Emory’s best and brightest students— from undergraduates to PhD candidates—and find out how the university is helping them flourish by preparing them for a lifelong journey of transformation, contribution, and service.

It’s no secret that Emory students rank among the finest in the country. And the university’s No. 1 priority is to help them flourish, realize their potential, and excel in all aspects of their lives.

That means creating an inclusive environment where they feel at home, strengthening their values, developing their skills, preparing them for advanced and professional studies, and equipping them to succeed in their careers.

“Student flourishing is about being intentional in how we prepare our students for not only professional achievement but also success in life— providing resources and creating space that allow students to find their purpose through critical think-

18

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WINTER 2021

ing and self-reflection,” says Ravi Bellamkonda, Emory provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.

These sixteen students featured here embody the spirit of Emory. They are thinkers, doers, innovators, and team players. And they all want to make a difference.

Their success here at Emory in the classroom, in their labs, through their community service, and as leaders in student organizations empowers them to head out into the greater world and serve humanity.

THE YEAR 2020 proved to be one for the history books, marked by a global pandemic, civil unrest, and one of the most contentious elections in modern American history. Lisa Chung was finishing a master’s degree program in the Rollins School of Public Health while conducting COVID-19 research and getting people to the polls.

Her interest lies at the intersection of infectious diseases and social epidemiology. During the final year of her master’s program, Chung worked with Professor Jodie Guest, vice chair of the Rollins Department of Epidemiology, on the Emory COVID-19 Outbreak Response Team. She also helped write the COVID-19 prevention plan for the Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska.

“The pandemic highlighted a large gap of understanding in health as well as significant health inequities in Georgia and around the world, which is a large part of why I applied for a doctoral program,” says Chung, who previously studied viral infections in cancer patients at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

In addition to pandemic prevention work, Chung, with the support of fellow students and faculty, co-led the Rollins Election Day Initiative to remove academic barriers to voting. Election day is now a Rollins-wide holiday—something Chung hopes will spread across campus. “Public health is not partisan, but it is political,” Chung says. “When constituents lose their access to the ballot, not having representation translates to policies that can have an impact on their health.”

Chung has earned several awards for her work, including Emory’s Martin Luther King Jr. Community Service Award and the Dr. Kathleen R. Miner Scholarship for Public Health Excellence.

She also received the Marion Luther Brittain Award, which recognizes “significant, meritorious, and devoted service to Emory University with no expectations of recognition or reward.”

With the support of her community at Rollins, Chung is pursuing a PhD in epidemiology at Emory with Guest as her academic adviser.

“I have received a fantastic education at Rollins, but the people make this a more meaningful place to be,” Chung says. “You can find inspiration and encouragement everywhere.”

—Kelundra Smith

EY EING A F UT UR E W IT H O U T P UBLIC H EALT H DIS PARITI E S E . LISA C H U NG 2 1P H 27 PhD Epidemiologist, doctoral candidate, and voting rights activist

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GROWING UP in Houston, Texas, Jordyn Turner

S UPPORTING HER E NT RE PR ENEURIAL SP IRIT JO R DYN T U R N E R 2 2B Serial entrepreneur, innovator, and marketing and sociology student

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says she was a crafty child, selling earrings, Rexlace keychains, and even ballerina tutus to classmates.

When it was time to look at colleges, she was determined to find a place that would support her entrepreneurial spirit and celebrate diversity. Now a senior majoring in consulting and sociology, Emory has offered her both. She also had the chance to fulfill a lifelong dream when she received a scholarship to study abroad in Spain for six weeks.

“I remember seeing the Delta Sigma Theta and Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority houses, and I knew this was the place for me, not because I wanted to join one of those sororities, but because [the presence of those houses meant] I wouldn’t have to sacrifice Blackness for academics,” Turner says.

Since enrolling at Emory, Turner has found a supportive community, grown one business, and started another. Her first company, A+ Academic Services, matches college tutors with K-12 students. She’s now working to transform A+ into an educational software product that offers tutoring in core subjects, the arts, and trades.

The desire to go digital is inspired by her second business, the Neos app, in which users create visually driven, digital “business cards” to connect with those who share similar interests and causes. Turner started Neos through the Hatchery, Emory’s student start-up incubator, where she currently works.

“It’s one thing to have methodical programs, but [at the Hatchery] we talk about the mental struggles of being an entrepreneur and how to cancel the noise and focus on one idea,” Turner says.

Turner’s ambition has helped her attain tuition scholarships and caught the attention of the Atlanta Business Chronicle, which named her on their list of twenty-three Atlanta-based innovators under the age of twenty-five. Now, Turner says she wants to focus on paying it forward.

“It made the biggest difference when I realized I didn’t have to divorce my love for humanity from my passion for business,” Turner says.

She adds, “I had a five-year plan and during the pandemic a lot of things shifted for me internally. . . .

I think the thing that excites me the most is there is some uncertainty about my future now.”

–Kelundra Smith

CAT DYMON D 2 0 N 2 1N Visionary midwife, nursing student, and mother of two

ACCORDING TO the Centers

SEEK ING A BET T ER BIRTHI NG EXP ERIENC E FO R M OT H ERS

for Disease Control and Prevention, Black and Indigenous women are three times more likely to die from preventable complications during childbirth than white women. For Cat Dymond, this just won’t do, which is why in 2016 they cashed out their 401(k) and moved from Boston to Atlanta to earn a bachelor’s degree from Emory’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing.

Dymond, who has two adult children, has been a doula for twenty-seven years, providing her services free of charge. They earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology with a concentration in maternal-child health from Harvard University. They see nursing as an extension of their earlier work with people experiencing homelessness as well as women who survived domestic violence. While working at a women’s health center in Houston, they had an encounter that changed their life.

“One night a woman showed up after having experienced an assault,” Dymond says. “Even though we were not an emergency room, the sexual assault nurse examiner, who was also a midwife, was so warm, tender, and respectful. I thought that’s what I want to do. It’s not just about catching babies;

it’s about providing health care in the midwifery model of care with a consciousness of trauma and culture.”

Since enrolling at Emory, Dymond has entrenched theirself in the community. They are a Woodruff fellow and serve on the Dean’s Executive Student Council. Dymond interned at Grady Hospital in the emergent dialysis unit, which serves people who are dying due to lack of access to dialysis care. They also earned the Emory Alumni Association Leadership Scholarship, as well as a scholarship from the nonprofit Midwives for Black Lives. At the 2020 nursing commencement, Dymond received the Excellence in Social Responsibility Award.

Now, they are finishing their master’s degree in nursemidwifery. After graduation, Dymond hopes to bring maternal health care to the people through a mobile midwifery service.

They recently won a microgrant from the Hatchery, Emory’s student start-up incubator, to begin delivering care.

“Beyond the bedside, nursing education is visionary,” Dymond says. “Here I am a middle-aged woman, and I upended my life, and it was worth it. I’m so proud to be a nurse, and I’m looking forward to what I do with it.”–Kelundra Smith WINTER 2021

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RODRIGO SALINAS

G I V ING VOIC ES TO T H E VOICE L E SS Rodrigo Salinas 24C Chemist, musician, and student mentor

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came to Emory to study chemistry, but since he arrived, he’s found that and so much more. In fact, he says Emory has helped him find his voice—both as a leader and an artist.

“Emory sets students up for success by providing opportunities that we do not normally have,” says Salinas. “Many students come from diverse backgrounds, where they may not be able to conduct research, participate in educational discourse, or even just have advisers that serve as advocates for them.”

He has benefited from that advocacy, first as an incoming student receiving guidance from mentors, and now, as a second-year student helping others and passing down that compassion. Salinas has met one-on-one with students from underprivileged and underrepresented backgrounds who might not feel comfortable talking directly to a professor or even being in that formal sort of academic environment. At the same time, his professors have helped him pursue his personal passion for chemistry and his aspiration to become a physician.

Meanwhile, an Emory scholarship has also empowered Salinas to indulge his love of music; he receives free private lessons on clarinet and bass clarinet and virtual performances from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. “I wouldn’t be able to attend Emory or participate in orchestra or even have my own instrument without that scholarship,” he says. “I hope that Emory continues to be inclusive, because I believe that a lot of untapped potential rests within those who work extremely hard from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. This all helps Emory give voices to the voiceless.”—Tony Rehagen

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BELIEV ING HE ALT H AN D WELL- B E I NG UN DER P INS E VE RY T H ING IN O UR L I VE S MCKAYLAH HILLIARD 22B 23PH Nurse, innovator, and future health care administrator

MCKAYLAH HILLIARD has always known that whatever she does in life, she wants to make sure she has the broadest possible impact, both in terms of how many people she helps and her impact on the project, job, or profession as a whole.

When it came to health care, that meant Hilliard felt compelled to leave life as a registered nurse where she felt she was only treating one patient and one family at a time to focus on the entire health care system. That’s why she’s currently a second-year MBA candi-

THE COMPLEXITY of disease fascinates Jordan Lewis. As a PhD candidate in the Population Biology, Ecology, and Evolution program at Laney Graduate School, Lewis is decoding how host-parasite relationships evolve, and how hosts evolve to defend themselves and reproduce. His research as an evolutionary biologist focuses on a worm, C. elegans, the first multicellular organism to have its entire genome sequenced. This makes the date at Goizueta Business School

worm highly useful for identifying

focusing on hospital administration

human disease genes and im-

and operations. “I think that your

proved ways to diagnose and treat

health and well-being as a person

disease. The recipient of a Nation-

is pretty fundamental to everything

al Science Foundation Graduate

else in your life,” says Hilliard. “That

Research Fellowship, Lewis is helping

was a big driver for me in choosing

decode biodiversity and diversify

a career.”

research science.

Another powerful driver for

As a fellow for Emory Diversifying

Hilliard toward her ongoing commit-

Graduate Education, Lewis recruits

ment to and career in health care

talent like himself. And as a Nat C.

was the experience of her sister,

Robertson Graduate Fellow in Sci-

who struggled with chronic pain

ence and Society, he teaches Emory

for decades. She saw her bounced

College undergraduates and shares

between doctors and specialists

graduate-level concepts with those

before finally getting diagnosed

interested in biology, medicine, and

with a genetic disorder last year.

“It was a really difficult place to be in, feeling like you couldn’t do a whole lot to help,” says Hilliard.

“Just seeing that for many, many years growing up really made me want to go into the health care in-

ST RIV ING TO B EC OM E AN INF LUEN T IAL SC IEN T IST AN D M EN TO R

dustry and hopefully do something

ethics careers.

Today, he notes, about 6 percent of PhDs in life sciences are held by Black scientists; that figure is less than 1 percent in evolutionary biology. “My field needs me,” says Lewis, who hopes to lead a research lab one day.

to help people.”

“After Emory, I want to be not only

And thanks to Emory, Hilliard

an influential scientist, but also an

hopes to drive innovation in health

JORDAN LEWIS 22PhD

influential mentor, making the field

care systems all over the world to

Evolutionary biologist,

more diverse and inclusive, and

improve the health and well-being

disease researcher, and

also making it a field that students

of entire populations and commu-

diversity advocate

enjoy more.”

nities.—Tony Rehagen

—Michelle Hiskey WINTER 2021

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PAYING IT FO RWAR D TO T H O S E IN N EED really believed in me,” says Walker, WHEN THE CORONAVIRUS BRYN WALKE R 2 0 Ox 2 2 C who returns to Oxford regularly. “I emerged in March 2020, Bryn Walker Undergraduate researcher, Library of really, really value my education quickly found a way to help. The history Congress intern, and historian and getting to just read and write major shared a Google doc listing and study all the time. That’s the contacts and resources at Emory to her dream and I’m grateful. I’m able friends and classmates to assist them to do that because of the sacrifices that my parents made. I in figuring out what to do about housing, moving, storage, and hope to make them proud, and I hope to make the communiother immediate matters following the sudden closure of the ty proud of me as well.” university. Her message acknowledged the fear many of her Walker has thrived in her history studies, and she has classmates felt, especially those who were food insecure, and earned the John and Ouida Temple Scholarship, Oxford Colrallied others to pitch in: “We stand together as a community lege American History Award, and Woodruff Dean’s Achieveas we face this crisis,” she wrote. ment Scholarship. Her academic record, including an UnderWalker’s selfless action paid forward the support she graduate Research Fellowship, led to her securing a prestigious had been given as a first-generation college student from position at the Library of Congress, as a teaching with primary Terre Haute, Indiana. The close community at Oxford College sources intern that started in January 2021. helped her feel at home, and she excelled in the warm welcome. “Not really knowing what I was doing going into college, it really helped to be a part of such a tight-knit community and to have so much support from faculty and students who

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Just as Emory invested in her, she reaches out to others in need, following the motto: “If you are more fortunate than others, build a longer table not a taller fence.”—Michelle Hiskey

AS A FOURTH-YEAR doctoral student studying sensory learning—specifically how humans process and use sound socially—Dakshitha Anandakumar spends a lot of hours exploring how personal experiences shape social behaviors. Her own experiences as an international student hailing from a small village in India have transformed her into a more empathetic and courageous person and have motivated her to take on leadership roles on campus. That’s why, last year, she volunteered to serve as vice president of community engagement for the Graduate Student Association.

“The most fulfilling part of graduate school has been helping people find their communities and putting together resources that uplift people from nontraditional backgrounds,” says Anandakumar.

In recognition of those efforts, she was recently awarded the Emory Alumni Board Leadership Scholarship. “Receiving this scholarship gives me validation and makes me feel appreciated; it has motivated me to keep contributing to the benefit of nontraditional students,” she says.

Anandakumar is grateful to Emory for the education, experience, and exposure that she continues to receive. “Growing up, working, let alone higher education, was not really expected or encouraged for girls by our family or teachers,” she says. “However, when I came here, the support and concern shown by the community at Emory helped create an enriching learning environment where students like me feel comfortable to share opinions and have open discussions.”

In her three years at Emory, she’s noticed a marked shift in the campus culture toward more diversity and inclusiveness, including more philanthropic support for students and families that might not otherwise be able to afford the educational opportunities. “All these students have to do is open themselves up to the experience. I learned to go out there and make time to take up leadership roles,” she says. “I didn’t just close myself in the lab. I learned to put myself out there and seek opportunities. And I have seen results.”—Tony Rehagen

H ELP ING NON T RADIT IONAL ST UDEN TS F IN D A S ENS E O F C OM M UN IT Y DAKSH IT HA ANAN DAKU MAR 24 PhD Neuroscientist, volunteer, and campus leader

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TH RIVING ON C ONN ECT IONS SARAH F I NC H 24 PhD AN D JAM ES F I NC H 24 PhD AI language researchers, innovators, and childhood sweethearts who married

CAN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE solve our loneliness and disconnection? That provocative question drives James Finch and Sarah Finch, two very connected humans in the Laney Graduate School. Married in 2019 and both recipients of the George W. Woodruff Fellowship, the Finches made headlines when their fourteen-person Emory team won the $500,000 global 2020 Alexa Prize SocialBot Grand Challenge.

Their invention Emora—a feminized version of Emory—is programmed to ask questions, make inferences, and understand opinions. Basically, it engages in dialogues with humans candidly through a smart speaker or other Internet-connected device and responds as a friend would.

“A back-and-forth collaborative experience” is how Sarah Finch describes it.

To fine-tune Emora’s ability to communicate, the Finches rely on their own. “We’re dealing with very complex ideas on a daily basis. Transmitting an idea to another human brain in a reasonable amount of time is very difficult, and there’s constant miscommunication that happens,” James Finch says. “That’s not so much of a hurdle between us. We almost always feel like we can understand each other.”

“If we can create more flexible and robust dialogue capability in machines,” Sarah Finch explains, “a more natural, conversational interface could replace pointing, clicking, and hours of learning a new software interface. Everyone would be on a more equal footing because using technology would become easier.”

Emora is hoped to help people who are isolated, depressed, or have a neurological dis-

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ease like Alzheimer’s. The Finches use a mathematical formulation called predicate logic to enable a computer to manipulate information received from a human and make inferences.

Emora can remember, for example, whether the user has a pet or just bought a home, and connect related concepts.

Because big life decisions like buying a house are more important than buying groceries, for instance, Emora can infer that someone who adopts a pet or buys a house is excited. “The key is for Emora to remember things that the user has shared in the past and leverage that information to make even better conversations that are more personal,” James Finch says.

The Finches have worked in sync since they were thirteen-year-olds in the same math class in Grand Blanc, Michigan. As undergraduates at Michigan State, they discovered a passion for tackling the limits of computerized dialogue systems, which led to the Emory Department of Computer Science Natural Language Processing Research Laboratory.

“Who doesn’t want to be able to talk to their computer, right?” James says. “We just wanted to see if we could crack this really hard AI problem that’s been basically unsolved for decades.

We believe that a free exchange of information between a computer and human was the only strategy that really has a possibility of working long term.”

Upon earning PhDs, Sarah Finch hopes to continue her work in private industry, while her husband aspires to a career in academia.

—Michelle Hiskey

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S OLIDIFY ING MY PASSIONS C U TLE R CAN NON 2 0 Ox 2 2 C Medical linguist, phytochemist, and future physician

CUTLER CANNON grew up on a sheep farm in a small country town just north of Dallas. He says being surrounded by nature–in conjunction with his Jewish upbringing–greatly influenced his views on herbal medicines and traditional therapies and how they can be used alongside modern medicine to treat patients.

Since middle school, Cannon started following the work of Cassandra Quave, an ethnobotanist at Emory who studies the use of botanical remedies to treat infectious diseases (see Quave’s story on page 8). So, when it came time to apply to college, Cannon had a good idea where he wanted to go.

“The problem with the integration of botanical medicine and traditional therapies is that there is a lot of stigma that follows it,” says Cannon.

“People think it’s pseudoscience and ‘fake’ medicine, but the biochemistry says otherwise.”

By coming to Emory and joining the Quave Research Group, Cannon was able to work alongside Quave in her cutting-edge lab. The experi28

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ence provided Cannon with access to modern research techniques and a legitimate path forward in the field of medical ethnobotany.

Once this fourth-year Emory student graduates with his bachelor’s degree in linguistics, Cannon plans to pursue a master’s degree in ethnobotany before moving on to medical school. He hopes to use this platform to further extol the benefits of integrative therapies and change how medicine is perceived and taught around the country.

“It’s exciting to see how Emory is catering to these rather avant-garde research initiatives,” says Cannon. “If I had gone somewhere else, there wouldn’t have been an ethnobotany lab; there wouldn’t have been an experience to solidify where my passion is, and I wouldn’t be able to confidently say that this is what I’m meant to pursue. Now, with Emory coursework and Quave’s mentorship under my belt, I can definitively say that this was the right decision and that I can clearly see a path ahead.”

—Tony Rehagen

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S ERV ING M Y F ELLOW C LAS SMAT ES AN D M Y UN IVERS IT Y RAC H E L DI NG 2 0 Ox 2 2B Political scientist, global citizen, and community builder

EVEN THOUGH her older sister had attended Emory years before her, Rachel Ding was still eager to see if Emory’s reputation as an elite institution of higher learning was a reality. It wasn’t until she herself arrived at the Oxford College campus and got involved in the Oxford College Student Government Association, that Ding realized the university was also a close-knit community. “I really felt like key professors, administrators, staff, and also, just the campus itself invested in me,” she says. “I don’t think I would’ve felt that valued as an individual at any other college.”

A fourth-year student majoring in finance and international studies, Ding also quickly found that Emory was her gateway to a global business community—including a deeply rooted relationship with the world-renowned Carter Center. “Emory has given me many opportunities to study international relations,” she says. “I have the privilege of taking classes and learning from really notable people within the international community.”

One of those professors, Yawei Liu, director of the Carter Center China program, has also taught her much about her own heritage and opened up an aspect of political science that she had never before explored. Ding imagines herself one day building upon what she learned at Emory into a career with an organization overseas, where she hopes to help foster diplomacy in international development.

But first, like any upstanding community member, Ding is working to give back to the school and student body that has provided her with all of these advantages—by serving as president of the Emory University Student Government Association, marking her second presidency during her time at Emory. “I hope to make Emory a more welcoming place,” she says. “I truly want to make Emory somewhere where we have a community spirit and where we feel like we can all belong. I want to create an environment where students learn how to exist in the world as good, ethical human beings.”—Tony Rehagen

US ING LANGUAGE TO T RANS FO RM LIVES CALE N MAC DONALD 2 2 C Undergraduate researcher, crew team member, and writer

MANY PEOPLE played “telephone” growing up, passing a message from person to person and seeing how it changed by the time it got to the final recipient. This childhood game provides insight into language evolution for Emory senior Calen MacDonald, who’s conducting research with Professor Benjamin Wilson in the Department of Psychology.

The research marries MacDonald’s two majors: neuroscience with a concentration in behavioral biology and creative writing. He is intrigued by how language is passed down and how people receive messages based on their connotations with various symbols, words, and objects.

“I’m really interested in storytelling and the way that humans express themselves, says MacDonald, who grew up in Palmetto, Florida. “I think that’s how we connect and how we frame what we do. I want to understand the way we put together the narratives of our lives.”

His interests also coalesce with Emory Reads, a volunteer program

where Emory students tutor kids in Atlanta Public Schools. “The way the kids engage with stories in such a sensory way—only as a child did I get that absorbed into a story,” says MacDonald. “A lot of what I did was reading with them and having them read to me. When you see that one-on-one impact, you can feel the influence that you’re having.”

MacDonald is also a member of Emory’s crew team. Though they were unable to compete in 2020, members used their time to give back by donating money to Legal Aid Atlanta following protests for social justice. He says the team is also becoming more intentional about trying to diversify the sport.

After graduation, MacDonald hopes to continue researching language evolution. He’s waiting to hear back about a Fulbright to conduct research at the University of Edinburgh.

Until then, he’s enjoying the journey.

“I kind of feel like my experience is a sample platter of everything Emory has to offer,” he says. “Emory gives you all the tools you need for success.

It’s really up to you to put them together and build something.”

–Kelundra Smith

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TAK ING A B OLD PATH TO PAY IT FORWAR D J U LI E WEC HSLE R 2 1 C

LEARN ING s C I E NCE AN D M EDIC IN E ARE NO LONGER IN DIV IDUAL S P O RTS

Fulbright Scholar, committed mentor, and health communicator

JULIE WECHSLER’S journey at Emory from follower to leader was short—and influenced her daily walks around campus, too. She says she took advice from students who were older than her and had been down the path before and made it seem like it was possible, and then learned from tracing their footsteps.

She started on this journey just before her first year in college, leaving her comfort zone in Durham, North Carolina, early to participate in Emory’s Student Outdoor Adventure Retreat (SOAR)—a three-day pre-orientation program designed to build community among incoming students. It opened Wechsler’s eyes, and she’s since became a SOAR leader herself, a peer mentor in the Emory Pre-Health Advising Office, a mentor for local students in the Emory Pipeline Collaborative, and an undergraduate teaching assistant in the Emory Program in Linguistics.

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paths, made me feel like my opinion was really useful to somebody else,” Wechsler says.

Bumping into mentees around campus boosts her Emory experience, too. “Getting everybody out of their comfort zones through SOAR and other advising situations was really bonding and created some lasting relationships,” she says. Wechsler is passionate about using communication as a critical tool for better health. In fact, she founded JHealth, a leadership development and educational program that promotes Jewish perspectives on bioethics and other health care topics.

A recent Emory graduate, Wechsler will soon be conducting research in Spanish as a Fulbright Scholar in Peru. Her project focuses on the impact of a national registry of medical interpreters and translators of Indigenous languages. Thanks to her research experiences and her incredible mentors, she feels prepared to undertake this work in January.—Michelle Hiskey

WINTER 2021

CAR EY JANSE N 2 2PhD 24 M Researcher, mentor, and cancer biologist

EVEN BEFORE Carey Jansen came to Emory from Athens, Georgia, she’d heard about how collegial this place was. But it wasn’t until she arrived and entered the MD/PhD program that she realized it’s deeply true—and an essential part of the Emory experience.

“Being able to work together with people from all over campus has presented opportunities to do some really unique and innovative things on the research and clinical sides,” she says.

“Science and medicine are no longer individual sports. I think Emory is uniquely positioned to support a better future because we prize this teamwork and this collegiality.”

In addition to Jansen’s academic achievements, including winning the William and Catherine Rice Research Award for her work in cancer immunotherapies, she has also been rewarded by the experience of mentoring younger students. She says she’s just passing

DIV ING DEEP ER TO H ELP M O R E P EO P LE EVE R ETT MOSS 23N Firefighter, paramedic, and future nurse

EVERETT MOSS was a secondon the welcome that was extended to her by professors, researchers, and clinicians at Emory who have always treated her like a future colleague rather than an underling.

“It results in a lot of really good working relationships that endure long beyond when we graduate and go our separate ways,” she says. For these efforts, she won the 2021 Emory Graduate Student Mentor Award.

This united front is important when battling a foe as pervasive and deadly as cancer. Jansen says it empowers everyone, from student to researcher to clinician, to drive advancements in cancer treatments and train future generations of doctors and scientists to combat this disease. “It’s no longer good enough to say the problem is too hard, we’ll leave it for later,” says Jansen.

“We’re really pushing forward to try to solve it no matter how hard it might be. I think it’s really exciting for what it means to exist as a global community and as an Emory community.”—Tony Rehagen

generation Atlanta firefighter as well as a paramedic. But he wanted to do more—and Emory was the key to that future. “As a first responder, your care stops at a certain level,” says Moss.

“You can’t really follow the patient through the continuum of health care.

So, leaving the fire service allowed me the opportunity to dive deeper and learn more when it comes to medical management of a variety of patient types.”

When it came time to choose the school where he would pursue that deeper health care knowledge through a career as a nurse anesthetist, the native-Atlantan Moss knew of Emory’s global reputation in the health care field. But it was actually the university’s personal relationships that sold him on his hometown school.

For instance, he met Kelly Wiltse Nicely, director of Emory’s CRNA program at a conference in Augusta, Georgia, and Moss was immediately struck by her compassion and

support for each of her students. “I felt that they had a passion for the student outcomes,” says Moss. “They really cared about the students, their families, and their goals.”

Moss applied to Emory and was accepted in December 2019. But before starting class in fall 2020, Moss answered the call for help in the sudden wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He left to volunteer as an ICU nurse and code response team nurse at hospitals in hot spots in New York City and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas.

By the time he arrived at Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing in August 2020, after months of helping strangers through unprecedented times, Moss was glad to see the friendly faces of professor Nicely and the rest of the CRNA program at Emory.

“We have a small group of students per graduating cohort,” says Moss. “That’s real big for me because at larger programs with more students, it’s hard to have that interpersonal connection.”—Tony Rehagen

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THE FUTURE STARTS HERE

A DAY

in the of

LIFE

EMORY

photos by stephen nowland and kay hinton From the break of dawn to well into the night, Emory’s campuses bustle with activity, as students, faculty, and staff go about their daily routines. Take a look at what life is like at Emory today through these captured moments of intense beauty, of focused work, of laughter shared with friends, and of higher learning.

7:50 A.M.—DAWN’S EARLY LIGHT The rising sun illuminates a surge of activity on the Clifton Corridor, the key artery between Emory and its surrounding communities.

A DAY IN Megan Yang 19Ox 22C THE LIFE OF I’m a senior double majoring in psychology, as well as film and media studies.

This fall, I’ve started my post-Emory job search and have been very active in a number of student organizations, all while getting through my classes for the rest of the semester. Here’s my typical busy day at Emory.

9:40 a.m.—Woke up and joined my first class from Zoom from the comfort of my apartment.

10:38 a.m.—I live off campus so I took a quick walk to the shuttle stop on Clairmont Campus. The shuttle drivers are so nice!

5:08 p.m.—Decided to go on a run at the WoodPEC indoor track.

It always feels good to get a workout in!

6:00 P.M.— Attended an info session about student programs at Ogilvy, which is my dream company.

11:10 a.m.—Grabbed a brunch meal from student-favorite spot Kaldi’s Coffee at the student center. I ordered a hot matcha latte and the classic avocado toast. I was able to get some homework done for class, too.

Noon—My second class of the day is Film 403: The Biz with Dr. Nsenga Burton. We’re learning about diversity in the Hollywood industry.

1:00 P.M.— Tabled for my club at Wonderful Wednesday, a longstanding tradition at Emory for groups to engage with students.

2:17 p.m.—Just got out of my third class, Finance for Non-BBA’s. Today we learned how to measure risk and return in the market.

3:51 p.m.—Finished the fourth and final class of the day, MKT 341: Global Marketing Seminar with Dr. Jagdish Sheth. Today we got to hear from a classmate who owns a business and give him advice on how to grow the company.

“I take little moments to re-center throughout the day. We’re emotional critters and sometimes our emotions take us down the wrong path into our stress personality. I try to bring myself back to center so that I can feel good and make sure I’m giving my best personality to those around me. Emory’s Cognitively Based Compassion Training taught me to take stock of the moment and refocus my mental energy with compassion towards myself and others. It’s a reminder that the situation is usually better than our minds lead us to believe.”

Andrew Pendley 15B, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Emory University Hospital Medical Director 7:30–9:00 p.m.—Met with members of the Model UN travel team to prepare for our upcoming conferences.

9:30 p.m.—Made it back home after a long day, ready to tackle class assignments and then get some sleep.

10:23 A.M.—STUDY TIME Marketing student Taylor Ramaeckers 22B gets in a morning study session at Goizueta Business School.

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8:46 A.M.—A MOMENT OF MEDITATION Emergency physician and professor Andrew Pendley takes a brief pause from the daily stress of his work at Emory University Hospital.

9:19 A.M.—A ROOF WITH A VIEW The university’s canopy of trees shows off its autumn colors looking west from atop Emory University Hospital.

10:04 A.M.—BUSY BEE Emory’s Education Gardens (this one next to Candler School of Theology) serve as living laboratories for students and faculty alike.

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10:36 A.M.—NEURAL NETWORKING Doctoral

candidate Kate Hardin 25PhD (left) goes over some of her research with her adviser, professor James Zheng, in his neurobiology lab.

12:15 P.M.—GROUP LUNCH Students take their pick

from yummy, organic foods from the Farmer’s Market and dine outside on the Emory Student Center steps.

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1:37 P.M.—GETTING STEAMY Long-time employee Frankie Parker helps run the Emory Steam Plant, making sure campus buildings stay warm.

A DAY IN Anya Kasubhai 22Ox 24C THE LIFE OF I’m a second-year Oxford College student from Tenafly, New Jersey, who plans to double major in anthropology and philosophy, politics, and law. I stay active on campus as the president of the Oxford Student Activities Committee (SAC), co-president of the Oxford Chorale, events chair for the South Asian Cultural Association, an Ignite mentor, and a Learning to Lead facilitator.

12:30 p.m. —Class got out a bit early today, so I grabbed lunch to go and sat with the SAC members at our table. I helped put everything away and then went to my room to go over the cases we were reviewing in my Criminal Justice class later this afternoon.

6:00 p.m. —I met up with one of my classmates for dinner to go over our setup plan for the Twilight event tonight. Since the event is pajama themed, I got changed after dinner and went to the student center to get ready for setup.

10:40 a.m.—I headed over to the Student Center and grabbed SAC decorations, a table, flyers, and Halloween candy to promote our Twilight event that night.

6:40 p.m.—Technical difficulties!

We had to scramble to find a new location to show the movie, but it all worked out. We were even able to finish setting up for the event ten minutes early. I helped out at the food and drinks station for most of the event.

11:30 a.m. —I left the SAC table to go to my Global Black Feminist Politics class, which was being held outside on this beautiful day. We talked about Afro-Latin American feminist thought and how it connected to Black feminisms in America.

9:45 p.m.—After a successful event, we celebrated two SAC members’ birthdays. Cake!

7:30 a.m.—I finally woke up after hitting the snooze button on my alarm twice and got ready for the rest of the day. I then went over to Lil’s (the dining hall) to grab some breakfast, drink some tea, and get started on some schoolwork.

11:51 A.M.—BARRE NONE Xavier Bell 22C balances his studies in neuroscience with a second major in dance, here practicing his moves in Mara Mandradjieff’s Level 3 Ballet class.

10:30 p.m.—Went back to my dorm room and hung out with my roommate, Hailey Hunt 220x 24C. We discussed our days and did a bit more homework before getting ready to go to bed.

11:30 p.m.—Lights out! I listened to some music to help me fall asleep before another busy day tomorrow.

A DAY IN Deanna Altomara THE LIFE OF 20C 23PH I’m an Emory alumna—I earned my undergraduate degree in creative writing and human health—and now I’m a first-year master’s student in the Department of Behavioral, Social, and Health Education Sciences at Rollins.

I’m interested in the intersections of health communications, climate change, and infectious diseases.

7:03 a.m.—Woke up thirsty, wondering which tea should I drink.

Probably chai—I needed the caffeine.

Except I didn’t want to be too jittery for my History of Public Health presentation.

8:24 a.m.—I had some spare time before class, so I chilled at Lullwater with my friend the heron, which is always a good way to calm down.

2:47 P.M.—CAPTIVE AUDIENCE Assistant Professor Carl

Suddler teaches Mass Incarceration beyond the New Jim Crow, an intensive seminar course for juniors and seniors.

health campaigns addressed issues like childhood nutrition and vaccination. It helps me to understand how we arrived at today’s challenges and how we can address them.

1:02 p.m.—Research Methods class today for three hours, and I’m already exhausted from this morning. Why doesn’t this school have nap pods? @gregfenves 3:01 p.m.—Team Rollin’ With It is about to ace this group project! We’ll be designing a quantitative study on social support and physical activity among older adults—as soon as we get some Kaldi’s.

4:50 p.m.—Me: *quietly working on my lit review outside Alabama Hall* Emory squirrel: *screams* 6:30 p.m.—Dinner in Decatur! Real question: Jeni’s or Butter and Cream for dessert?

9:22 a.m.—Caught in a sudden downpour. I had to frantically dry my hair in the bathroom (all paper towels successfully composted).

11:15 a.m.—Presentation time! The topic: reducing infant mortality. I love learning about how historical public

10:15 p.m.—Did some unwinding in my apartment after a crazy but rewarding day. Excited to keep learning about this amazing field and work toward building a career telling impactful stories that educate people about disease and promote health equity.

10:46 p.m.—Time to recharge before jumping back into my busy week. Hot tip: Biostats textbooks are the ultimate sleeping aid.

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3:09 P.M.—FITNESS FOCUS Howard Hou 22C stays in shape by working out five days a week at the Clairmont Campus Fitness Center.

3:57 P.M.—GAME FACES Eagles soccer star Lily Dresner

21C and her teammates get pumped up for a home match at WoodPEC varsity field.

3:16 P.M.—PERFECT SPIRAL A student descends the beautiful spiral staircase at Carlos Hall.

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4:27 P.M.—GIVE ME A BREAK The Depot by Kaldi’s Coffee is a

favorite spot for students to catch up and unwind after a day full of classes.

4:53 P.M.—THE GAME’S AFOOT An impromptu game of hacky sack kicks up outside Emory School of Medicine building.

6:19 P.M.—SUNSET GLOW Emory students parade by Asbury Circle just as the sun begins to set.

A DAY IN Brian Goebel THE LIF E OF I’m managing director of the Roberto C. Goizueta Business & Society Institute, an academic research center with a mission to transform business to build a more equitable and climate-smart world. I oversee the institute’s collection of innovative fieldwork programs and student activities that boost neighborhood vitality in Atlanta and beyond, as well as serve as a course instructor in nonprofit management and the Philanthropy Lab. 8:30 a.m.—I usually start my day with a cup of coffee, but today that coffee ritual was even more special as I joined nearly two hundred business students for coffee and conversation. It was a chilly day, but a perfect morning to team up with the Refuge Coffee Truck, a local social enterprise, to come to campus and celebrate all things social impact.

11:30 a.m.—I’m consistently wowed by the commitment Emory students have to making our Atlanta community stronger. For the first time in person this fall, I met with the Emory Impact Investing Group leadership team to hear more about their plans and how I can help assist in their mission of making more $5k to $10k loans to small businesses making a positive impact right here in Atlanta.

Noon—The Business & Society Institute hosted visiting Executives-in-Residence Sam Moss and David Kyle on campus. Sam and David advise our students on impact investing and other social impact career goals (and also are great mentors to me as well). We took advantage of the sunny weather to get MBA social enterprise students together with Sam and David for lunch filled with lively conversations about the role of business in society.

4:20 P.M.—SILENCE IS GOLDEN The Matheson Reading Room in Candler Library is one of the quietest spots to study on campus.

proud members of the Georgia Social Impact Collaborative, we discussed some of the exciting work underway across Georgia focused on equitable economic development.

6:30 p.m.—Back home and looking forward to watching the Atlanta Braves in the 2021 World Series.

Before the first pitch, I walked with my dog Mickey around my Kirkwood neighborhood. He picked the Braves to win in six games. Smart dog.

4:00 p.m.—After putting in some time on Zoom calls and email, I had a chance to close out my day on campus chatting again with Sam Moss.

Sam and I gave two thumbs up to the new outdoor furniture now set up throughout the business school. Both

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7:24 P.M.—SUPER TROUPERS Students Elizabeth Peters 23Ox (left) and Makalee Cooper 23Ox (center) take center stage during a lively adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It outside and under the lights at Oxford College.

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6:41 P.M. Twilight Tête-à-Tête Eliana Kavouriadais 22B (left) and Castle Rossi 24C enjoy a chat on Alabama Lawn as the last glimmer of sunlight gives way to nightfall.

8:10 P.M.—NIGHTTIME STROLL The Connector Bridge over Eagle Row lights up the silhouettes of students headed toward the Whitehead Biomedical Research Building.

10:53 P.M.—KEEPING IT CLEAN Driver Johnny Davis takes out the soiled laundry at Emory University Hospital and delivers fresh linens.

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THE FUTURE STARTS NOW

TAKE A PEEK INSIDE THE LIVES and work of some of Emory’s top researchers— their motivations and passions, the struggles they overcame, and why they do what they do. From the physician investigating the differential effects of COVID-19 to the evolutionary biology student committed to rehabilitating the reputation of bats, Emory’s research enterprise is vast and diverse. Hundreds of students and faculty members are engaged in solving some of life’s most enduring and urgent problems. No one journey is alike. While some took the traditional route, others have zigged and zagged before landing on a research career. What they all share is the belief that their work will eventually better humanity.

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OVERCOMING HEALTH DISPARITIES TO TREAT COVID-19

TREATING COVID Zanthia Wiley, associate professor of infectious diseases, examines a patient who is overcoming COVID-19.

PHOTOGRAPHY JACK KEARSE

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ong before she became interested in science, Zanthia Wiley wanted to help others. For this physician and researcher who specializes in infectious diseases, science has never been about the lab. It’s always been about people.

It’s a way to bridge the gap between current reality and her deep-rooted belief that everyone deserves to be treated equitably.

The only doctor in her family, Wiley was raised in a small town in Alabama by a single mom and grandparents who inspired in her an almost missionary zeal to look out for those around her. Not surprisingly, then, her first major research project during the COVID-19 pandemic centers on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on certain communities. Why, for instance, are underrepresented

minorities dying at twice the rate of other groups?

“As a hospital-based, infectious diseases doctor, I became interested in the patients being admitted with COVID-19,” Wiley says. “What zip codes are they living in? What factors increase the likelihood of their contracting the virus? And which of these patients subsequently return to the hospital within a set period of time? My primary research now is trying to describe some of the factors that may increase the likelihood of Blacks and Hispanics contracting COVID-19 and the factors that contribute to their re-hospitalization.”

Wiley says she is working with more than thirty research colleagues from Emory hospitals, the VA, and Grady to address these disparities. “We range from medical students all the way up to full tenured professors from multiple specialties,” she says.

“But we want this to be more than research within the four walls of our hospitals. We are looking at what we can do in our group and in the Emory community to meet people where they are.”

“WE ALL HAVE THE For instance, Wiley and her SAME GOAL: TO colleagues recognize that there GET OUT OF THIS are barriers—such as a lack of PANDEMIC AND TO Internet access or transportation—for certain communities PROVIDE THE BEST to come and receive the vaccine.

CARE THAT WE CAN “One of the things I think is TO EACH OTHER AND really important is bringing the vaccine to the community,” she OUR PATIENTS.”

BY RAJEE SURI

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TACKLING THE PROBLEMS BEHIND MATERNAL MORTALITY

A says. “I think it’s great to have central vaccine sites, but I’m looking forward to the day we have mobile vaccine units at neighborhood hubs like churches, libraries, and community centers.”

Very early on during the pandemic, Wiley noticed that many of her patients looked just like her. “They look like my grandmother; they look like my aunt,” she says.

“The disparities in COVID-19 are very personal for me.

Fighting against this disease is equivalent to fighting for my family.”

And while COVID-19 has struck her own family, witnessing the tragedy and travesty of this on a daily basis has forever altered her perceptions as a researcher and physician.

“COVID-19 has truly magnified what I already knew was out there,” she says. “To see how this has ravaged our community and our world has been life changing.

The structural issues, structural racism, and structural inequities are here.”

Wiley believes Emory has played an invaluable role in fostering this important research. “I feel like I’m appreciated, and I feel like my thoughts, opinions, and ideas are trusted,” she says. “I have veteran professors on my research team to help guide me through this process. And, on the other hand, I have medical students—young Black women who are able to witness and see my growth and what they can do, how they can contribute to clinical research. And we all have the same goal: to get out of this pandemic and to provide the best care that we can to each other and our patients.”

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DYNAMIC DUO Assistant professor Alexis Dunn-Amore (seated, right) serves as a mentor for nursing student Katiana Carey-Simms, who is pursuing a master’s degree.

of nursing, a certified nurse midwife who delivers babies at the Atlanta Birth Center, and a nurse-scientist who is trying to figure out why so many women in the US—especially Black women—are dying of complications from pregnancy or childbirth.

Her mentee, Katiana Carey-Simms 20N 22N, a master’s student in the nursing program, is a registered nurse and an aspiring midwife, and credits her adviser for many of her skills as a thinker and practitioner. A lesson Carey-Simms is placing great value on these days is how research and data can help transform policy and shift ground realities to benefit expectant moms most at risk of dying.

America’s maternal health outcomes are the worst in the developed world. It is the only developed country where the maternal death rate is rising. When a woman dies during pregnancy or within a year of childbirth, that’s typically considered a maternal death. Every year, seven hundred women die due to pregnancy, childbirth, or subsequent complications, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

PHOTOGRAPHY JACK KEARSE

SPOTLIGHT ON DISPARITIES COVID-19 has put the spotlight on health disparities of underserved communities, Wiley says.

lexis Dunn-Amore was three years old when she told her pregnant great-aunt to stop smoking. “I didn’t know how to read, but I knew that inhaling tobacco was bad for the baby,” she says. “It was maybe all the birth stories I had absorbed from my grandma, who had helped deliver many of her eighteen siblings.”

Dunn-Amore’s commitment to moms and babies has since found more far-reaching avenues. She is an assistant professor

An estimated additional fifty thousand women each year face severe consequences to their health as an outcome of pregnancy or labor. Black mothers die at three times the rate of white and Latina mothers, one of the widest racial disparities in women’s health.

Dunn-Amore and Carey-Simms say the reasons why so many Black women perish in the postpartum period range from poverty and a lack of health care access to untreated chronic conditions and mood disorders to systemic racism and bias. In Georgia, new or expecting mothers are estimated to be more than 50 percent likely to die than nationally within a year of giving birth.

LOOKING FOR ANSWERS Assistant Professor Lauren McCullough researches why cancer outcomes for Black women are so disproportionately poor to their white counterparts.

MAPPING INEQUITIES IN BREAST CANCER OUTCOMES

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF ALEXIS DUNN-AMORE, LAUREN MCCULLOUGH

S BRIDGING RACIAL DIVIDES Black mothers die at three times the rate of white and Latina mothers, one of the widest racial disparities in women’s health.

Dunn-Amore’s interest in maternal mortality is personal. She nearly died after giving birth to her first child. Much of her research focuses on health disparities and the disproportionate toll it takes among expectant and new moms, EVERY YEAR, SEVEN many of whom look like her. She HUNDRED WOMEN DIE is currently building a web-based DUE TO PREGNANCY, platform that uses a list of CDC indicators that typically precede CHILDBIRTH, OR maternal death so women can SUBSEQUENT COMPLIaccess information to help them CATIONS, ACCORDING triage their symptoms. Another TO THE US CENTERS FOR research project she’s leading is exploring the relationships beDISEASE CONTROL AND tween gut health, inflammation, PREVENTION. and postpartum depression.

ix months into the COVID-19 pandemic, breast cancer epidemiologist Lauren McCullough felt like she was hanging by a thread. Like many working moms during this crisis, she was balancing an exhausting workload—teaching, researching, writing, mentoring her graduate students—while at home schooling two elementary school children and nursing and caring for her infant.

So one afternoon, when her boys begged her to join them “WE ARE LEVERAGING outside in play, she THE DIVERSITY OF pushed aside thoughts of looming deadlines GEORGIA TO TRY and embraced the AND DISENTANGLE moment to put back THE EFFECTS OF RACE the fun in her work.

Armed with sidewalk FROM CLASS AND chalk, she soon turned FROM GEOGRAPHY a game of sketch on the ON MORTALITY street into a conceptual DISPARITIES.” model for a new grant.

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“My research framework was literally street art—it did leave some of our neighbors scratching their heads,” she laughs.

Once a competitive baton twirler, choreographer, and dancer, McCullough says she often finds herself using skills from her artistic past in her scientific present. “A lot of the creativity that I used, especially as a choreographer—seeing the end before the beginning and being able to space people across time—has really helped me in how I think about the research problem: strategically and creatively.”

An assistant professor at Rollins School of Public Health, McCullough knew her calling early on. She was a sophomore in college when her father was diagnosed with advanced-stage lung cancer. Watching him navigate that complicated medical journey made her pivot from a career in medicine to a future in epidemiology.

As she was going through the diagnosis with him, she says she wondered, “Well, what about the social factors? What about the fact that my dad doesn’t feel comfortable with his oncologist, so he’s refusing

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everything? What about all these other things that are not biology, not physics, not chemistry?”

Those questions now lie at the heart of McCullough’s work: She is investigating why outcomes for Black women with breast cancer are so much worse than their white counterparts despite socioeconomic status and other seemingly favorable characteristics.

McCullough is conducting a county-level mapping exercise in Georgia to understand the landscape of breast cancer disparities and spotlight urban and rural areas that can benefit from better resources for care. “We are leveraging the diversity of Georgia to try and disentangle the effects of race from class and from geography on mortality disparities,” she says.

Nationally, Black women are 40 percent more likely than their white counterparts to die of breast cancer, but in metro Atlanta, Black women are twice as likely to die of breast cancer, McCullough says. Through their research, she and her colleagues discovered that Black women have disproportionately poor outcomes despite possessing what are considered good

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indicators for cancer patients—usually a hormonally responsive tumor that is treatable. Racial gaps persist even when women receive initial therapy consistent with cancer guidelines, she says.

And Black women who live in better neighborhoods, are highly educated, have insurance as well as access to health care, and have an above-average income do much worse than white women with a similar background.

Her initial work on breast cancer disparities was piloted through funds from Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute in 2018 and later received funding from the Susan G. Komen Foundation and the National Cancer Institute to expand the surveillance work across the state.

McCullough says that Emory students play an integral role in her research. “Being able to take them out into the community and showing them why what they do matters, that excites me most,” she notes. “I am not going to figure out disparities in my time, so I want to ensure that there remain people who are passionate enough to see this research through.”

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF LAUREN MCCULLOUGH

ADVOCACY MATTERS Driving more attention and funding to researching health care disparities is critical, McCullough says.

SACRED WORK Jesse P. Karlsberg, senior digital scholarship strategist and associated faculty member of music, is working to expand and digitize a sacred songbook library.

HARNESSING THE POWER OF SONG TO HEAL DIVIDES

PHOTOGRAPHY JACK KEARSE

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hat can a buried trove of overlooked and sacred songbooks from a century ago tell us about how people navigated race, religion, and place—and can it help reconstruct our national conversation about those topics now?

It’s an ambitious question and one among many that Emory music faculty member Jesse P. Karlsberg 13G 15PhD hopes to answer as he expands the digital footprint of Sounding Spirit, a one-of-a-kind, historic sacred songbook library that he first developed as a doctoral student here. The books in the online collection encompass a host of musical genres: spirituals, gospel, hymns, and shape note singing.

Many of the songs offer glimpses into the roots of America’s current racial dynamics, speckled with sentiments ranging from white supremacy to the longing to be free to the lure of home. What most intrigues Karlsberg is how this music encouraged people to cross boundaries that were typically taboo and the lessons it holds for us today.

“Transport yourself back to West Georgia in the 1850s.

These songs were in the air, sung in the fields, in churches,” he says. “While they were created under oppressive conditions, they wove a shared cultural fabric that extended across racial lines. Sounding Spirit is an invitation to mine these texts for the ways diverse peoples and communities made meaning together, whether through conflict, expropriation, or collaboration.”

A renewed infusion of funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities will enable Karlsberg and a multi-institution team to untangle this unique and intricate slice of American history while adding more than 1,250 books of sacred music, published between 1850 and 1925, to the digital library.

Based at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the project offers Karlsberg an opportunity to marry his two loves: history and collecting. As a child in Boston, he spent summers

gathering up sand dollars, progress“SOUNDING SPIRIT ing to bottle caps, stamps, and old IS AN INVITATION TO music books as he grew older.

MINE THESE TEXTS FOR Now a scholar of American music and a Sacred Harp singer, Karlsberg THE WAYS DIVERSE says the books they are archiving were PEOPLES AND COMMUonce printed in the hundreds of thouNITIES MADE MEANING sands but are rare to find in libraries these days. “Even though this music TOGETHER.” was taking place in the backyards of many educational institutions, it just wasn’t on the radar of scholars.

By creating a forever home for these songbooks, Karlsberg says the digital library is taking the first step towards telling a more inclusive and more complicated story of American music and sacred music. “In prioritizing works to include in the digital library, we’ve done our best to rectify imbalances in historical collecting efforts by institutions across the country,” he says. “Works will include those edited by or containing music sung by Black people, authored by women, and in a range of languages.”

While Sounding Spirit’s contribution to understanding history is important, Karlsberg says the project will also gain significance for harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to enable more sophisticated optical music recognition. Researchers from computer science and natural language processing will partner with historians and musicologists and use these new technologies to obtain textual and musical information from songbook page images.

“How do you know when you have a bunch of blocks of text on a page what order they come in? Well, that’s a simple problem for a singer, but quite a difficult challenge to do automatically,” says Karlsberg. “But AI has opened up new, exciting strategies for extracting this information. This project will enable us to improve existing methods and develop new approaches in that space and share our learnings widely.”

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he discovery of lead contamination in Atlanta’s mostly poor, largely Black, Westside neighborhood began innocuously. Two years ago, Emory environmental science professor Eri Saikawa, who wanted to help her then-graduate student find a thesis topic, suggested looking at soil samples in a community where urban agriculture was proliferating.

What Saikawa and her student found in Atlanta’s Westside was “shocking and heartbreaking.” The lead levels in the soil were unacceptable enough for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to classify more than one thousand properties in the community as a Superfund site, which means the EPA will take responsibility for cleaning it up, an undertaking that can run into millions of dollars.

Without Saikawa and her research team, the community may never have known that their playgrounds, backyards, and gardens contained hazardous waste from bygone smelters, and they may never have been able to build a case for the Superfund designation. Without the Westside project, Saikawa says she may never have made the leap from environmental researcher to community scientist.

When she began the project, Saikawa’s expertise was in greenhouse gas emissions and air-quality modeling. Her first foray into field research began in a small village in Tibet where she and her team were researching

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household air pollution. Under pristine blue skies, she found women burning yak dung inside their tents. “Very hazardous air is about 500 mcg per cubic meter,” Saikawa says. “When we measured the particulate concentration matter inside the tent, it was 150,000 mcg per cubic meter. I couldn’t even see the person standing in front of me—the smoke was that dense.”

She thought the women would be outraged and want to fix the problem once they realized how dangerous it was to their health. Instead, they told her that exposure to the toxic air bothered them less than the melting glaciers in their community.

The encounter made Saikawa rethink conventional ways of solving climate change. “We cannot really talk about climate change in a constructive way because it becomes somehow normative—we should do this, we should do that. We need to understand what we value and why we value it. That may be one way to find a better solution.”

Like many researchers around the world, Saikawa had to adapt to the new normal of the pandemic to continue her research in the Westside.

For instance, her partnership with the community had to change from going door-to-door to collect soil samples to creating a soil drop box for residents.

PHOTOGRAPHY JACK KEARSE, COURTESY OF ERI SAIK AWA

GETTING THE LEAD OUT (OF OUR SOIL) TO PROTECT FUTURE GENERATIONS

WINGED INSPIRATION Doctoral student Amanda Vicente-Santos says we can learn a lot about human diseases by studying bats.

PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF AMANDA VICENTE-SANTOS

FIELD WORKER Eri Saikawa, professor of environmental science, employs field research to study ways to improve air and soil quality.

“We were able to collect about three hundred soil samples, and “WE CANNOT REALLY that was the biggest number ever TALK ABOUT CLIcollected,” Saikawa says. “It opened up a new way to engage the MATE CHANGE IN A residents too.”

CONSTRUCTIVE WAY That model has gained so BECAUSE IT BECOMES much credibility and acceptance that Louisiana state public health SOMEWHAT NORMAofficials wrote to Saikawa that they TIVE. . . . WE NEED TO want to replicate it in New Orleans.

UNDERSTAND WHAT Gratified that the authorities are acting decisively to clean up toxic WE VALUE AND WHY sites, Saikawa says her work in the WE VALUE IT.” community will continue as long as they require her services, especially because there is no safe level of lead exposure for children.

While it’s hard to get Saikawa to talk about herself, her reticence disappears when the topic shifts to her students. She took one group to witness the historic climate talks that led to the Paris Agreement. Her research team comprises undergraduate and graduate students from multiple fields, including the humanities. “Emory offers opportunities for interdisciplinary research to students of all ages and academic backgrounds,” she says. “That is something I never thought about before I came here, and now I treasure it.”

DEMYSTIFYING BATS WHILE LOOKING FOR WAYS TO PREVENT THE NEXT PANDEMIC

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he next pandemic could be averted if we better understand why viruses spill over from wildlife to humans. Emory researcher Amanda VicenteSantos 24PhD is looking at bats for answers.

Vicente-Santos knew her calling even before she could name it. Growing up in a small Costa Rican port town, she had her pick of the Pacific Ocean and rainforest as playgrounds. She swam in waters with humpback whales and bottlenose dolphins and learned to blend in with an astonishing array of birds and animals in the jungle that towered behind her home. So her pursuit of a future in ecology came as no surprise. Less expected was “I AM TRYING TO how vital her area of research UNDERSTAND HOW would become because of HUMANS ARE CHANGING COVID-19.

THE RULES OF NATURE, A doctoral candidate at Emory’s Laney Graduate FORCING ANIMALS TO School, Vicente-Santos is a

ADAPT TO THESE CHANGES, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR OUR OWN HEALTH.”

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disease ecologist studying the immune systems of bats. Bats inevitably figure in the discussion of any disease outbreak, and COVID-19 is no exception, with some researchers pointing to the world’s only flying mammal as the origin species for the virus. While that theory continues to persist, Vicente-Santos is examining the other side of that equation: Understanding the impact of people on bats and how their immune systems respond to human incursion on their homes. She is looking at stress markers on cave-dwelling bats in Costa Rica that will help predict a “spillover” event—the moment when a pathogen jumps from one species to another, eventually ending up in a person who can then infect others.

“I am trying to understand how humans are changing the rules of nature, forcing animals to adapt to these changes, and what it means for our own health,” Vicente-Santos says.

Bats make for perfect study animals because they are not confined to one region, she adds. “They exist in such diverse environments, which presents a great opportunity to assess how our encroachment into wildlife refuges is hurting them and us.”

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PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF AMANDA VICENTE-SANTOS

IN THE WILD Research trips to Costa Rica led by Vicente-Santos help stimulate Emory students’ interest in natural sciences.

Vicente-Santos is particularly in awe of the immune system of bats, especially how it has evolved to help them fly.

Bats can also live up to forty years in the wild, unusually long for such small mammals.

Vicente-Santos says she chose Emory because she found the ideal adviser—associate professor of environmental sciences Thomas Gillespie—an expert on zoonotic diseases recognized for his integrative approach to the conservation of biodiversity and mitigation of emerging infectious diseases.

Gillespie was among the first scientists to demonstrate that human impact on the environment can alter the dynamics of natural pathogens in wildlife and create opportunities for pathogens to jump between species. Vicente-Santos’s doctoral work has been a centerpiece of applying this “One Health” approach in her native Costa Rica.

Gillespie says Vicente-Santos’s dissertation addresses a critical gap in our understanding of how human disturbance of ecosystems alters disease risk. “We desperately need well-designed empirical studies that integrate animal health surveillance complemented by detailed ecological data on natural and anthropogenic systems, and that is the core of Amanda’s research thesis,” he says.

Vicente-Santos came to Atlanta as a Fulbright scholar and when that funding ended, Emory stepped in to provide financial assistance. Emory is among the top institutions for the number of research training grants awarded to students, and Vicente-Santos has put her grant-writing training to good use by winning a slew of small awards.

She is paying it forward: she has taken small groups of undergraduate female Emory students on research trips to Costa Rica to stimulate interest in science and upend myths about bats. Vicente-Santos says while research in Costa Rica is under-resourced, it remains a budding scientist’s dream environment. “The forest and the ocean are living research laboratories and something you cannot build,” she says.

THE FUTURE STARTS WITH YOU

Meet the Emory Alumni Association’s

2021 class of young graduates who make their alma mater proud by making waves across the world in business, research, public service, leadership, and philanthropic endeavors.

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PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF EMORY ALUMNI

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E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E

FATEMAH ALBADER 17L

SUMEET BAHL 05C

discovered her passion to teach, inspire, and motivate at Emory.

Today, as an assistant professor at Kuwait International Law School, she serves as a strong advocate for human rights in the Gulf region. Her research and publications have tackled honor killings and citizen rights.

works as interventional radiologist at the Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York and is also a real estate entrepreneur. Bahl loves teaching meditation, and through the EmoryTibet partnership, he researched compassion meditation and the immune response to stress.

social justice work, and she built on her undergraduate studies at Emory to become a human rights attorney for Project South in Atlanta, where she fights for immigrants’ rights through movement lawyering, legislative advocacy, and litigation.

LEILA BUCARY 05C 06PH

HOLLY BULLARD 07C

SANDRA CHAN 11B

AMY B. CHENG 09C 15L

thrived at Emory, where she was named the university’s NAACP Overall Woman of the Year in 2005. Now a scientist, she works in cancer research at AstraZeneca, where she also serves on the Clinical Trial Diversity Initiative.

Bucary is the president of the Washington, D.C. Chapter of the Caucus of Emory Black Alumni.

brought her Capitol Hill expertise to her home state to catapult the fledgling Florida Policy Institute, where she serves as its chief strategy and development officer. She’s helped lead the nonprofit to new heights in fundraising, recognition, and state policy impact by following her vision of a better Florida.

started her career in branding and marketing before moving into the tech education space, where she was recognized as a pioneer in STEM education. Today, as a wellness entrepreneur and founder of Everbest Technologies, Chan develops programs that empower burnt out professionals to achieve freedom and fulfill their full potential.

began as a pre-med student at Emory, but when she saw the effects that law and policy can have on communities, she pivoted her career.

Now as an attorney at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough in Atlanta, Cheng utilizes her business acumen to specialize in solving employer problems and is a renowned litigator.

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PRIYANKA BHATT 11Ox 13C is passionate for

RENJI BIJOY 14C is the founder of Immersed, a Techstars start-up partnered with Facebook, HTC, and Microsoft to build VR Offices, which has raised $12M to date.

For his work as an entrepreneur and software architect, he was named part of the 2021 Forbes 30 Under 30.

KARI BROWN 06C 11M 11G holds a deep interest in biology and a desire to help others that led her to a career in medicine. As senior medical director in clinical development at Aimmune Therapeutics, Brown is part of the team that developed the first FDA-approved treatment for peanut allergies.

ROXANA CHICAS 16N 20PhD, a bilingual, bicultural assistant professor in Emory’s School of Nursing, researches the health effects that environmental and occupational exposures have on farmworkers. She pursued a PhD in nursing under the direction of Dean Linda McCauley, and her professional journey owes largely to McCauley’s mentorship and support.

JASMINE CLARK 13PhD is a mom of two, holder of an Emory doctorate, an Emory nursing lecturer, and a Georgia state representative. She directed the 2017 Atlanta March for Science and, in 2018, was elected to state office after running on a platform of bringing a science voice to legislating in Georgia.

LOGAN GANS 07C is the youngest tax partner at Shutts & Bowen, one of Florida’s largest and oldest law firms. In his practice, he advises both domestic and international businesses and high-net-worth individuals on the evolving intricacies of US tax law and is an emerging thought leader in his field.

AVANA EPPERSONTEMPLE 12C is a

DONTE FLANAGAN 04Ox 06N is a certified regis-

GREG GALANT 05C is

JOANNA GALARIS 15PhD

litigation attorney at the Boston-based law firm Peabody & Arnold.

She is an advocate for domestic abuse survivors and provides pro bono representation to survivors. She serves on the board of Pine Street Inn, the largest homeless services provider in New England.

tered nurse anesthetist, entrepreneur, and president-elect of the School of Nursing Alumni Association. He created the Bigger Dreams, Better Tomorrows Foundation, which helps RNs become nurse anesthesia candidates and provides mentees with a monthly support group.

the co-founder and CEO of Muck Rack, an online platform created to help PR client teams work together. He’s also the co-creator of the Shorty Awards, which honor the best of social media.

BusinessWeek named him one of the nation’s “Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs.”

lived in eight different countries before moving to the US for college. She became a Global Health Corps fellow at Partners In Health in Rwanda, and now serves as the adviser to the executive director working at the intersection of strategy, partnerships, and policy.

TED GOSHORN 15T 21T walks the journey of life with those he serves and loves it. He does this through ministry as pastor of the Eastman First United Methodist Church in Eastman, Georgia. He works closely with community partners, both through the church and social organizations, to find solutions to local problems.

TAYLOR JARL 16B is a

SYLVIA JOHNSON 03C

AMRIT KAPAI 08C is

product manager at Google, focusing on Google Assistant, a product with more than 500 million monthly users.

He’s also active in his community, leading volunteer recruitment and engagement for Minds Matter San Francisco, which supports the education of underprivileged children, and serves as a mentor to Emory students.

is a board-certified psychiatrist who served as an officer in the US Army for nine years, holding several leadership positions, including chairing the Department of Behavioral Health at Fort Hood, Texas.

She owns a behavioral health clinic in Orlando, Florida, and runs it from New Zealand, where she lives with her husband and four children.

an attorney and senior associate at Goldstein & McClintock in Miami, Florida, where he specializes in corporate bankruptcy and litigation. He recently found another meaningful calling: serving as a voice for the South Asian LGBTQ community through his cast member role on Bravo TV’s Family Karma reality show.

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ANNA LEE 10PH is an assistant professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. She credits her studies at Rollins School of Public Health for giving her a large-scale perspective on the determinants of oncologic outcomes and for driving her research interests.

MARISSA MITCHELL 07C is an anchor and host for Fox 5 Morning and Good Day DC in Washington, D.C. The Emmy-nominated and award-winning journalist—who cut her teeth as a journalist at the Emory Wheel—has also been featured on CNN, BBC World News, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and Jimmy Kimmel Live.

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MICHELLE YE HEE LEE 10C is the Tokyo/

CHERYL MAIER 15MR 17FM is an assistant

Seoul bureau chief for the Washington Post, where she leads the newspaper’s coverage of Japan, South Korea, and North Korea. She also serves as the president of the Asian American Journalists Association, which is dedicated to media diversity and fair and accurate news coverage of underrepresented communities.

professor in Emory’s Department of Pathology and medical director for the Specialized Coagulation Laboratory.

During the pandemic, she led a trial on the role of therapeutic plasma exchange and continues to investigate COVID-19 pathology and new treatment modalities for severely ill patients.

ANTONIO MOLINA 13C

REBECCA MORGAN 05C 07PH is the executive

is a US military veteran and an attorney with the community-focused firm of Nguyen & Pham, where he specializes in personal injury, transactional, and real estate law. He currently serves as chairman of the Georgia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and on the executive committee for the Georgia Independent College Association.

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director and co-founder of Evidence Foundation, a nonprofit in Cleveland, Ohio, that educates and helps organizations make informed health decisions. A former employee of the CDC, she holds a doctorate in health research methods. She’s also a faculty member at McMaster University and Case Western Reserve University.

ALEFIYA MASTER 08C is

KATHRYN MISHKIN 16PH

the founder and CEO of the award-winning educational app development program, MAD-learn. She strives to enable students to have career choices driven by their passions.

So far in her young career, she’s been able to create and grow two EdTech companies that reach more than forty-thousand students in thirty states and five countries.

is a maternal and child health expert, Fulbright alumna, and returned Peace Corps volunteer with experience in fourteen countries. She serves as senior director of Science, Data, Evaluation, and Innovation at March of Dimes. She is an appointed member of the Science Board at the American Public Health Association.

HIREN PATEL 06C is a

LARRY REICHER 08L is the chief of the Office of Decree Enforcement and Compliance for the US Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division in Washington D.C., where he combines his legal passion with his desire to serve the public good.

In this role, he leads the enforcement of civil judgments and the evaluation and promotion of effective corporate compliance programs.

neurosurgeon and board chair for the Chunilal Initiative, which creates neurosurgery missions and centers of excellence in underserved communities around the world.

He’s also a clinical faculty member at Harvard Medical School, and a staff neurosurgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and Avera McKennan Hospital.

CAMILLE RUSTIA 05C is a business affairs executive and attorney at Apple TV+ in Los Angeles, where she negotiates deals for original series including the critically acclaimed Ted Lasso. Previously, at Netflix she managed shows such as Stranger Things and Narcos. Rustia also has a side hustle: Ukay LA, a sustainable lifestyle brand.

FRANCOIS ROLLIN 09M 09PH 12MR and JESSICA ROLLIN 11M 15MR met while students at Emory and got married.

Francois serves as an assistant professor of internal medicine at Grady Hospital, and is inspired by students and co-workers every day. Jessica runs her own psychiatry practice in Grant Park, and is passionate about delivering psychotherapy to diverse populations.

JASMINA SALCINOVICSPAHIC 08AH has been practicing as a physician assistant for more than twelve years, serving in clinics throughout Iowa.

She works full time at VA Central Iowa Health Care and as needed at the Iowa Clinic. Last year, she was named diplomate fellow by the American Association of Physician Assistants.

MICHELLE TUCKER 07C has dedicated her career to addressing issues of educational equity, first working as an attorney with the US Department of Education where she focused on Title IX (sex discrimination) policy and enforcement. She now serves the Educational Opportunities Section of the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division as a trial attorney.

JOVONNI SPINNER 07PH

WIATTA THOMAS 06C

ALVIN TRAN 12PH is an

is an award-winning public health strategist and thought leader with a deep passion for improving health equity across the lifespan. She is the founder and CEO of Beacon Public Health, a health equity consulting firm that works to create healthy and whole communities by diminishing the impact of chronic diseases.

is the co-founder and CEO of AquaFarms Africa, an aquaponics franchise that provides wealth-building opportunities for African women.

A first generation Liberian American, she served with the Peace Corps in 2011 and since then she’s co-founded several organizations to support African start-ups and small businesses.

assistant professor of public health and the assistant provost for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut. In dual roles, he serves as a mentor to students and promotes inclusion and belonging on his campus, while also being a prolific researcher of health disparities.

JHAYMEE TYNAN 12B is a consultant and change agent for global health and diversity practices, and a passionate advocate for gender and racial equity. Tynan founded 100x2030, an initiative committed to sponsoring one-hundred women of color by 2030, and is calling on executive leaders to serve as sponsors for rising women of color within their organizations.

NOLA WEINSTEIN 05C

KEVIN WELSHER 05C is an assistant professor of chemistry at Duke University, where he has honed his love of teaching physical chemistry and leads a National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation–funded effort to capture the fast motions of single molecules and viruses in living systems.

is a culture creator and storyteller with a passion for elevating the voices of others and building community.

As Twitter’s global head of Culture and Brand Experience, Weinstein oversees how the brand comes to life and was the driving force behind Twitter’s #SheInspiresMe and #TwitterVoices programs to elevate women and underrepresented communities.

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THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME (left) Futuristic geodesic domes took over the Quad during the launch of Emory’s 2O36 campaign. (above) President Gregory L. Fenves and wife Carmel Fenves joined Alumni Board President Munir Meghjani 08Ox 10C in the annual Homecoming parade.

Celebrating a Bold New Course

Emory University kicked off its visionary 2O36 campaign amidst Homecoming and Reunion Weekend revelry.

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1.

2.

3.

STUDENT FLOURISHING: Seeing students realize

their potential, preparing them for a lifetime of accomplishment beyond graduation, providing an inclusive environment, valuing each student, and enabling them to excel in academics and all aspects of their lives.

FACULTY EMINENCE: Recruiting and retaining a diverse, top-tier faculty; investing in the faculty’s big ideas and scholarship; and creating a campus where all faculty have the resources and infrastructure to thrive in their research, teaching, and service.

RESEARCH EXCELLENCE: Launching the next era of Emory excellence in research and discovery to answer the most pressing questions and address the crucial needs of the nation and communities Emory serves.

PH O T O G R A PH Y K AY H I N TO N

T

he Emory Quad took on something of a futuristic look in late October, with five geodesic domes and a grand stage erected to tell the stories behind the university’s new 2O36 campaign and usher in a busy Homecoming weekend.

At the launch event open to the entire Emory community on Friday, October 22, President Gregory L. Fenves encouraged everyone—students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends—to think about their role in shaping the future of Emory, Atlanta, and the world. “The future starts now,” Fenves said. “The future starts with you.”

Named for Emory’s bicentennial, 2O36 is about investing in people for the benefit of people. In addition to supporting priorities across all nine of the university’s schools, multiple centers and institutes, and Emory Healthcare, Fenves introduced the three core areas where the campaign will place special emphasis. They are:

Fenves announced the campaign’s goal of adding 154 endowed faculty members, doubling the current number in an underfunded area.

He also emphasized the importance of reimagining and increasing student support by creating more scholarships, revamping career services, and doubling down on mental health and well-being.

Fenves concluded by saying, “With the partnership of our greatest supporters, student success becomes student flourishing; competing with the best becomes being the best; and having a research breakthrough

becomes having the research breakthrough that changes an entire field. With the success of this campaign, in 2036 we will be a research university without equal in a class of our own.”

The campaign event helped kick-start Emory’s Homecoming and Reunion Weekend, which featured a full slate of concerts and events.

Student-led activities throughout the

week followed a “Swoop’s Streets” theme.

The fun for all continued on Saturday with the traditional Homecoming Parade around campus, as well as the Homecoming Festival and Concert on the Quad, featuring performances by Yacht Rock Schooner, Lennon Stella, and headlining act Black Pumas.

For more details about Emory’s new campaign and a full overview of each school and college’s priorities, visit 2036.emory.edu.

ALUMNI OF TOMORROW

Students were invited to connect with Emory alumni during the 2O36 campaign and Homecoming and Reunion Weekend events that ranged across the university’s campuses, mixing learning with fun.

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“As a first-generation immigrant, my life was forever changed by the opportunity to attend Emory University. 2O36 is about passing that opportunity forward—allowing students with backgrounds like mine to experience the transformative power of Emory. This bold and ambitious vision for the university’s future isn’t just about making Emory a better place, but making the world a better place. I chose to make a planned gift because it’s my way of making good on that future, embarking on a long-lasting commitment, and ensuring the best and boldest students have access to an unparalleled education.”

—Munir Meghjani 08Ox 10C President, Emory University Alumni Board Commercial Real Estate Broker ATL ANTA, G EOR G I A

A legacy of heart and mind—200 years in the making. giftplanning.emory.edu • 404.727.8875

SOCIETY

E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E > > C L AS S NOT ES

class notes 50s Leonard H. Gilbert 58C of Tampa, Fla., a partner with the law firm of Holland & Knight, was elected to the board of Governors of the American Bar Association.

60s Myles B. Abbott 69C of Oakland, Calf., received the 2020 Bronze Bambino, a lifetime achievement award, from the medical staff at East Bay Pediatrics.

Nancy T. Benton 65C of Monticello, Ga., a trustee of the L.O. Benton Banking Foundation, received the 2021 Oxford College Alumni Board Award as an honorary alumna.

John V. Costley Jr. 63Ox 65C of Covington, was appointed to the DeKalb County Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) Advisory Board by Governor Brian P. Kemp.

John A. Edens 67C of Buffalo, N.Y, received the Owen B. Augspurger Award from the Buffalo Museum of History for contributions to the cause of local history.

W. Walter Grace Jr. 66C of Fort Myers, Fla., has joined the law firm of Green Schoenfeld & Kyle.

J. Harry Lange Jr. 63C of Cataula, Ga., is retiring after 20 years as a Harris County commissioner, during time which he served as chair for 13 years.

Frank L. Stubbs Jr. 64Ox of Edina, Minn., is a retired nonprofit arts executive and management consultant. He continues to serve on the board of directors of Cantus, a men’s vocal ensemble.

70s Henry L. Bowden Jr. 74L and Jeanne Johnson Bowden 77L of Atlanta, announce the birth of a granddaughter, Ivy Emory Bowden, on April 7, 2021. Ivy’s parents are Henry L. Bowden III 08C 12L and Yao Wu. Deborah Butler 75C of Gainesville, Fla., received the 2020 President’s Award from the Greater Gainesville Chamber for her dedication to business owners through the pandemic.

Roger T. Fleming 76Ox 79C of Bozeman, Mont., founding partner of Norfolk Strategies, published his second novel, Outsider Rules, focusing on a D.C. lobbyist insider’s perspective.

Thomas E. Jones Jr. 71C of Atlanta, a shareholder with the law firm of Chamberlain Hrdlicka, was named to Georgia Trend’s 2020 Legal Elite list.

Walter E. Jospin 79L of Atlanta, an attorney with the law firm of Finch McCranie, was the 2021 recipient of the Tuttle Jurisprudence Award by the Anti-Defamation League Southeast Region.

The award honors four exemplary leaders in advancing the ADL’s mission of social justice and fair treatment and were given at the virtual ADL Jurisprudence Awards on April 13, 2021.

J. Scot Kirkpatrick 79C of Atlanta, a shareholder with the law firm of Chamberlain Hrdlicka, was named to Georgia Trend’s 2020 Legal Elite list.

David J. Lance Sr. 74Ox 76B of Calhoun, Ga., CEO and president of Greater Rome Bank, was elected chairman of the board of directors of the Community Bankers

Association of Georgia.

Rolly L. Simpson Jr. 70G of Raleigh, N.C., a senior program officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, received the 2021 Founders Award from the American Physician Scientist Association (APSA).

80s

Award from the Baldridge Foundation.

Rita Tucker Williams 87L of Decatur, CEO of Williams and Associates, is listed in Marquis Who’s Who. Harold B. Yellin 82B 82L of Savannah, a partner with the law firm of Hunter MacLean, was selected for inclusion in “Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch 2022.”

the Anti-Defamation League Southeast Region recognizing her lifetime devotion to the pursuit of justice and the well-being of the community.

The awards were presented at the virtual ADL Jurisprudence Awards on April 13, 2021.

David K. Smith 82C of Calhoun, retired as chief superior court judge of the Cherokee Judicial Circuit of Georgia after 20 years of service.

James F. Tanner 88Ox of Chattanooga, Tenn., a lecturer in communications at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, was named chairman of the board of directors of the Greater Chattanooga Public Television Corporation.

Michael O. Ugwueke 86PH of Memphis, Tenn., president and CEO of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, received the Harry S. Hertz Leadership

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Frederick B. Axelrod 83M 87MR of Palm Springs, Calif., was elected chairman of the board of directors of Desert Regional Medical Center.

Douglas R. Hooker 87B of Atlanta, executive director of the Atlanta Regional Commission, was honored by the Atlanta Business Chronicle as one of the Most Admired CEOs of 2021.

Hooker also received the 2021 President’s Award from the National Association of Regional Councils.

Kimberly D. Jones 89N of Portland, Ore., was inducted into the International Nurse Research Hall of Fame by the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nursing (Sigma) in July 2021.

Reta Jo Lewis 89L of Washington, D.C., senior fellow and director of congressional affairs at the German Marshall Fund, was nominated for president and chair of the Export-Import Bank of the United States by President Joe Biden.

Ninfa M. Saunders 84B of Greensboro, Ga., president and CEO of Atrium Health Navicent, received the 2020 American Hospital Association Board of Trustees Award.

Leah Ward Sears 80L of Atlanta, a partner with the law firm of Smith, Gambrell, and Russell, was the recipient of the 2021 Lifetime Achievement Award from

90s Joshua M. Ammerman 96C and Alyssa Ammerman 96C of Bethesda, Md., have launched Butterfly Spirits, a specialty liqueur company.

Krista A. Boyd 99L of Arlington, Va., chief counsel for oversight and policy on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, was nominated for the position

YOUR KEY TO CLASS NOTES AH:

Allied Health

BBA: Goizueta Business School (undergraduate) C:

Emory College of Arts and Sciences School of Dentistry DNP: Doctor of Nursing Practice FM: Fellowship in Medicine G: James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies H: Honorary degree JM: Juris Master L: School of Law M: School of Medicine MBA: Goizueta Business School (graduate) MSN: School of Nursing (graduate) MR: Medical resident N: Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing OX: Oxford College MPH: Rollins School of Public Health (graduate) PhD: All doctor of philosophy degrees T: Candler School of Theology D:

SUBMIT CLASS NOTES TO: eurec@emory.edu

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RECRUITING AND RETAINING THE WORLD’S

BEST & BRIGHTEST

"Being part of the Goizueta Scholars community provided a network of role models and mentors that shaped the course of my career.”

Georgia Kossoff 18BBA Scholarship recipient

"Atlanta has some of the best and brightest people, and our students have access to them. These interactions can be formative in choosing a career. My Goizueta scholarship opened doors for me within the broader community.”

Casey Rhode 17BBA Scholarship recipient

“My scholarship was a blessing and offered me the time to explore the social issues that will shape my work in medicine.”

Arpita Gaggar 22BBA Scholarship recipient As a native Brazilian, Willi Freire 19BBA emigrated to Florida at age six with his mother.

“English was so hard at the beginning. I cried every time I got home from school for my first six months,” he recalls, but his mother instilled in him the critical value of education. Soon, fully bilingual in Portuguese and English, Freire set his sights on going to college.

He was awarded a scholarship to attend Emory and from the start, it opened Freire to a world of peer scholars who helped each other stay accountable. Research opportunities, internships, alumni interaction, and work with the Woodruff Foundation allowed him to immediately build community. “I had the chance to make my undergrad experience very intentional. At Emory, the opportunities are plentiful,” he says.

Now, as Freire grows into his new role at PwC Consulting Solutions in human capital, workforce development, and diversity, equity, and inclusion, he enjoys being an active alumnus who conducts workshops and provides opportunities for future generations of Goizueta students.

“My scholarship provided me with the unimaginable ticket to attain higher education at a world-renowned institution. I never had the means to attend a university like Emory. It made the impossible possible and gave me the resources and confidence to thrive, and I am deeply grateful."

“I am so thankful for my scholarship.

Goizueta has provided me more access to founders in need and the opportunity to help create initiatives like a minority-focused venture capital fund.”

Chis Anen 21MBA Scholarship recipient

“It’s so gratifying to know that there are people out there that want to make an active effort to assist women in embarking on their MBA.” Julie Friedberg 23EMBA Scholarship recipient

By contributing to student scholarships, you open the doors of opportunity for talented minds who may not have the financial means to attain a world-class education.

EMORY.BIZ/SCHOLARSHIPS

E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E > > C L AS S NOT ES

of inspector general of the Office of Personnel Management by President Biden.

Lori Gail Cohen 90L of Atlanta, vice chair of the law firm of Greenberg Traurig, was recognized in the 2021 Women in Business Law Expert Guide.

Julie Schwietert Collazo 97Ox 99C of Long Island City, N.Y, and Rosayra Pablo Cruz co-authored The Book of Rosy: A Mother’s Story of Separation at the Border. The book was featured in “The Best Nonfiction Books of 2020” in Kirkus Reviews.

David D. Duley 96Ox 98B of Atlanta, founder and CEO of the Secure Companies, participated in Global Entrepreneurship Week, “How the Entrepreneur ProblemSolves Social Security Depletion,” in November 2020.

David Ross Golder 96C of West Hartford, Conn., a principal with the law firm of Jackson Lewis, has been elected to the Connecticut Bar Foundation’s James W. Cooper Fellows program.

Golder, who earned a JD from the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, is co-leader of Jackson Lewis’ Class Actions and Complex Litigation Group.

Helen Kim Ho 99L of Duluth, founding partner of the law firm of HKH, was honored with the Civic Diversity Champion Award at the 2021 Atlanta Business Chronicle’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Awards.

Beth L. Hoffman 90C of Lovilia, Iowa, a former journalist and associate professor of journalism at the University of San Francisco, published the book Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America, in 2021.

Hoffman is currently a practicing farmer.

Shawn A. Kachmar 97L, of Savannah, was one of six Hunter MacLean attorneys honored as a 2020 Georgia Trend Legal Elite.

Soon Mee Kim 90C of Alpharetta, who serves as global diversity, equity, and

inclusion officer at Omnicom Public Relations Group, received the Board Champion Award at the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s fourth annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Awards.

Bernice A. King 90L 90T of Atlanta, CEO of the King Center, was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Atlanta Business Chronicle’s fourth annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Awards.

Jonathan E. Lass 95C of Austin, Texas, a partner with the law firm of Jackson Walker, was selected for inclusion in “The Best Lawyers of America 2021.”

Jennifer E. Mack 96C of Iowa City, Iowa, earned a PhD in archaeology from the University of Exeter, U.K., 24 years after graduating from Emory.

Ilan Markus, 96L of Fairfield, Conn., a partner with the law firm of Barclay Damon, was selected for inclusion in “The Best Lawyers in America 2022.”

Chad I. Michaelson 99L of Pittsburgh, a trial lawyer and partner with the law firm of Meyer, Unkovic and Scott, was selected for inclusion in “The Best Lawyers in America 2022.”

Christopher J. Radpour 90B of Chattanooga, Tenn., was awarded an endowment in proctology at the Pierre Fauehard Academy in recognition of his 20 years of exemplary public service.

Jeffrey S. Reznick 95G 99PhD of Derwood, Md., chief of the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, is publishing the book, War and Peace in the Worlds of Rudolf H. Sauter: A Cultural History of a Creative Life in January 2022.

Nathan T. Smithson 99C of Dallas, Texas, a partner with the law firm of Jackson Walker, was selected for inclusion in the “Best Lawyers in America List 2021.”

Julie A. Sullivan 96C of Peachtree Corners, is

co-chief operations officer for the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) Tech program at Emory.

00s Nikisha D. Alcindor 01C of The Bronx, N.Y., is the president and founder of the STEM Educational Institute, a nonprofit corporation that provides programming for underrepresented high school students to give them the technological skills needed to enter today’s workforce while also building generational wealth. Alcindor is currently pursuing a PhD in business at Baruch College.

Devi B. Dillard-Wright 99C 02T of Augusta, a philosophy professor at the University of South Carlina Aiken, published the book, Self-Love, in January 2021.

Benjamin E. Falk 04Ox 07C and Daniel Askew Falk of Raleigh, N.C., announce the birth of a son, Logan Haynes Falk, on September 22, 2020.

Donte A. Flanagan 04Ox 06N and Ashlee Yates Flanagan of New Orleans, La., announce the birth of a daughter, Yates Brooklyn Flanagan, on April 30, 2021. A nurse anesthetist, Flanagan received the 2021 William Norton Outstanding Alumnus/a Award from the Oxford College Alumni Board.

Leah T. G. Francis 01T of Indianapolis, Ind., vice president of academic affairs and dean of the faculty at the Christian Theological Seminary, published the book, Faith After Ferguson: Resilient Leadership in Pursuit of Racial Justice, in 2021. This book is a follow-up to Ferguson and Faith: Sparking Leadership and Awakening Community, published in 2015.

Jill Erica Franczyk 03PH of Downers Grove, Ill., a clinical trial manager at ICON, received the 2021 William Norton Outstanding Alumnus/a award from the

Oxford College Alumni Board Award.

David A. Furman 02C of Washington, D.C., is now a principal and the leader of health analytics solutions for federal government agencies at Deloitte.

William J. Gallagher III 09B of Savannah, a partner with the law firm of Hunter MacLean, was selected for inclusion in “Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch 2022.”

Kevin A. Gooch 99Ox 01C of Atlanta, a partner with the law firm of Holland Knight, was included on the “Atlanta 500,” Atlanta magazine’s list of the city’s most powerful leaders.

Christine O. Gordon 05C of Warminster, Pa., was named a partner with the law firm of Timoney Knox. A special education attorney, Gordon was featured on the Legal Talk television program.

Michael C. Harbour 04C of Los Angeles, Calif., was made a partner with the law firm of Irell & Manella.

Zachary B. Harris 05Ox 07C, of Brunswick, an associate with the law firm of Hunter MacLean, was selected for inclusion in the “Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch 2022.”

Anna R. Hartman 03C of Chicago, Ill., director of Early Childhood Excellence at the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago as well as the Paradigm Project, received the 2021Covenant Award for Excellence in Jewish Education. Presented by the Covenant Foundation, the award honors excellence and innovation in Jewish education across the country and is one of the highest honors in the field.

Joann Johnson Hill 03B of Villa Rica, chief of the Office of Business Development for the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) at the US Department of Commerce, is serving as the acting national field director of the US Commercial Service, for the International Trade Administration.

Kurt G. Kastorf 02C 06L of Atlanta, was selected by the Daily Report as one of

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the “Rising Star” attorneys in Georgia. Kastorf also interviewed the trial attorneys participating in the Georgia Trial Lawyer Association’s LEAD class of 2020-21 for Verdict Magazine. A trial and appellate attorney, Kastorf is a former member of the LEAD program. Kastorf was one of Emory University’s “40 Under Forty, “ a member of Georgia Trend’s “Legal Elite,” and a “Rising Star” in Super Lawyers Magazine.

Michael D. Lewis 04C of Washington, D.C., a partner with the law firm of Sidley Austin, was named to the Global Banking Regulation Review “45 Under 45” list.

Melanie Autumn Magidow 04C of Wakefield, R.I., republished her book, The Tale of Princess Fatima, Warrior Woman: The Arabic Epic of Dhat al-Himma, in August 2021.

Jaclyn Miller-Barbarow 06C of Hyde Park, Mass., director of giving at EVkids, earned her Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE) credential.

Cayce M. Myers 04C of Roanoke, Va. was named director of graduate studies at the Virginia Tech School of Communication and published the book, Public Relations History: Theory, Practice, and Profession.

Tolton R. Pace 00C 02PH of Rex, Ga. was named manager of Programs and Partnerships for the Home Depot Foundation.

Tiffany N. Porter 05L of Lilburn, was sworn in as Gwinnett County tax commissioner.

10s Alex M. Bein 11C of New York City, is an associate with the law firm of Carlton Fields.

Ranjit Bijoy 14C of Austin, Texas, was named to the “Forbes 30 Under 30” list for founding his company, Immersed.

Henry L. Bowden III 08C 12L and Yao Wu of Atlanta,

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Join President Gregory L. Fenves in select cities for in-person campaign launch events that will explore Emory’s future. With an eye on our bicentennial in 2036, learn how our university will continue to expand its extraordinary impact on the world.

C AL I F OR N I A 1/11 — West Beverly Hills

F LO RI DA 2/7 — Orlando

1/12 — San Diego

2/8 — Tampa

1/13 — Downtown San Francisco

2/16 — Miami

1/14 — Palo Alto/Menlo Park

2/17 — Ft. Lauderdale 2/17 — Palm Beach/West Palm 2/18 — Boca Raton

G EOR G I A 2/4 — Savannah

T EXAS 3/10 — Dallas 3/11 — Houston

64

EMORY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2021

E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E > > C L AS S NOT ES

announce the birth of a daughter, Ivy Emory Bowden, on April 17, 2021.

Robert Busch Jr. 09M 12MR and Lindsay M. Busch 05C 09M 13MR 15FM of Decatur, announce the birth of a son, Robert Jack, on April 11, 2021.

Adam J. Carlisle 11M 18FM and Jennifer W. Carlisle 19FM, announce the birth of twin daughters, Claire and Elise, in June 2021.

Katherine E. Cooper 15Ox 17C 19PH of Atlanta, regional prevention specialist at the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities, published her Rollins School of Public Health research entitled, “Factors That Influence Enrollment in Syringe Services Programs in Rural Areas: A Qualitative Study among Program Clients in Appalachian Kentucky,” in June 2021.

Allison V. DeFrees 08Ox 10C and Samuel R. DeFrees of Decatur, announce the birth their daughter, Leslie Carson, on May 11, 2021.

Victoria del Rio-Guarner 13C and Nicholas A. Lehn 12C, of Brooklyn, N.Y., were married in Mexico City on September 1, 2018, and announce the birth of a daughter, Valentina del Rio-Lehn, on November 11, 2020.

Zachary Todd Denton 18C of Alpharetta, was named a Luce Scholar for 2021–22 by the Henry Luce Foundation.

Scholars contribute their talents to NGOs, government agencies, private companies, universities, think tanks, and museums.

Sophia E. Ekstrom 08Ox 11C and Jamieson Ekstrom of Stone Mountain, announce the birth a son, Oliver, on July 3, 2021.

Avanna Epperson-Temple 12C of Atlanta, an attorney with the law firm of Peabody & Arnold, was named to the board of directors of Pine Street Inn, New England’s largest provider of services to the homeless.

Hiromi Hamada 17B and Shogo Hamada of Tokyo, Japan, announce the birth

of twins, son and daughter Rey and Kel Hamada, in April 2020.

Nafela Hojeij Helou 10Ox 12C and Georges Al-Helou, of Atlanta, announce the birth of a daughter, Sara Claire, on October 18, 2020.

Jessica W. Hike 10PH and Tayven R. Hike of Johns Creek, announce the birth of a son, Jacob Campbell Hike, on October 12, 2020. The Hikes are also the parents of Parker Hike.

Jie Jiao 11C and Kevin McKendree, of Seattle, Wash., announce the birth of a daughter, Nora, on July 23, 2021.

Dylan G. Jones 09Ox 11C and Con Chung 09Ox 11B of Melbourne, Fla., were married on October 17, 2020.

Suleman M. U. Malik VI 09Ox 11C and Kanwal Alam Malik of Selden, N.Y., were married on July 17, 2021.

John S. Mancini 15G and Kaitlin Flannery of Bronxville, NY, were married on August 14, 2021.

Joy Bruiana-Nevada Martin 11Ox 13C of Carrboro, N.C., received the 2021 Outstanding Young Alumnus/a award from the Oxford College Alumni Board.

Carter D. McCormick 18PH of Chicago, Ill, was named to Chicago’s Tenth Annual Jewish “36 Under 36” List.

Karishma Mehrotra 16C of New Delhi, India, has received a 2021-2022 the FulbrightNehru Open Study/Research Award in Urban Studies in India, to research the pandemic lockdown’s impact on the decision-making of migrants. Mehotra majored in international studies and journalism and is fellow at Scroll.in where she covers technology.

Jacob D. Myers 14PhD of Decatur, was selected by board of trustees of Columbia Theological Seminary as the Wade P. Huie Associate Professor of Homiletics. The chair was established in 2004 through the generosity of then-trustee William S. Morris III to honor the legacy of Wade P. Huie Jr. 46C who

served Columbia with distinction as a professor of preaching for three decades.

Matthew J. Parker 13L, of Huntsville, Ala., was made a shareholder with the law firm of Maynard Cooper Gale.

Gabrielle C. Pelura 15C of New York City, an associate with the law firm of Bressler, Amery, and Ross, was a professional excellence honoree in the “Unsung Hero” category of the 2021 New Jersey Law Journal.

Andrew Perra 11B and Dr. Olivia Janssen of Tenafly, N.J., were married on June 19, 2021.

Kandis Pugh-Alexander 12Ox 14C and Kimani Alexander of Atlanta, were married on March 7, 2021.

Brian A. Rudolph 12B and Marlee J. Madora 14C of New York, were married on Aug. 14, 2021.

Kiera L. Rider 11Ox 13C and Rashidi A. Virgo 12Ox 14C of Stone Mountain, announce the birth of a son, Theodore Virgo, on July 21, 2020.

John T. Rose 18L of Atlanta, an associate attorney at the law firm of Fox Rothschild, was named a 2021 Top Music Lawyer by Billboard magazine and featured in Variety’s 2021 Legal Impact Report.

Jennifer F. Seitz 19N and Kyle Seitz of Nashville, Tenn., were married on November 24, 2020.

Elliot Shuwei Ji 19C of Plainsboro, N.J., a PhD student in political science at Princeton University, was awarded a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, a graduate school fellowship for outstanding immigrants and children of immigrants in the United States.

Jane B. Stoney 13L of Charleston, S.C., was named a shareholder at the law firm of Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd.

David J. Topping 12L, of New Orleans, La., a partner with the law firm of Phelps Dunbar, was selected for inclusion in “Best Lawyers: Ones to Watch 2022.”

Anh Bao Tran-Le 14Ox 16C and Kendra Reams of Atlanta, were married on May 30,

2021.

Ayanna F. Young 11Ox 13C and Mark Young of Hollywood, Fla., announce the birth of a son, Edward James (EJ), on June 10, 2020.

Maria D. Zoccola 15C of Memphis, Tenn., a free-lance writer and editor, was included in the Spring 2021 issue of Ploughshares with her poem, “hike.”

20s Sandra Aguilera 15Ox

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK 17C 23PH and Sergio Cruz

Fajardo 17C of Decatur, were married on March 21, 2021.

Shifali Baliga 11C and Tony Lombardo 13B 21B of Atlanta, were married on Jul. 31, 2021, in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.

Georgia J. Brunner 21G 24G of Atlanta, a doctoral candidate in history, has received 2021–2022 Fulbright grant to research gender, labor, and identity between 1918 and 1985 in the building of Rwanda.

Anna G Crossley 20C of Roswell, who majored in English and creative writing, has been selected as alternate for the 2021–2022 Fulbright award to teach English in South Korea.

Alana V. Giarrano 20C of Brooklyn, who majored in political science, has been selected an alternate for the 2021–2022 Fulbright award to teach English in Laos.

Madelyn R. Haden 18Ox 21C of Newalla, Okla., has been selected as an alternate for the 2021–2022 Fulbright grant to conduct anthropology research in human health. and Middle Eastern studies, and South Asian studies in Morocco.

Bridget E. Hansen 20G 23G of Atlanta, a doctoral candidate in anthropology, received a 2021–2022 Fulbright grant for her research project creating psychiatry and transforming doctors in the Sultanate of

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Oman.

Megan I. Johnston 21C of Bradenton, Fla., who majored in applied mathematics and environmental sciences, has received a 2021–2022 Fulbright award to teach in English in Madagascar.

Hannah C. Kreuziger 21Ox 23C of Fayetteville, is the recipient of the 2021 Virgil Y.C. Eady Sophomore Service Award. Established in 1969 to honor the dean of Oxford College, the Eady Award is the sole student award reserved for commencement and is presented to a sophomore who has demonstrated outstanding and selfless service to the Oxford College community.

Brittany M. Landorf 24PhD of Minneapolis, Minn., a doctoral candidate in women’s studies and religion, has received a 2021–2022 Fulbright grant to research “Training the Soul, Cultivating the Gendered Self,” in Morocco.

Louise Liu 19Ox 21C of Rockville, Md., who majored in psychology, has received a 2021-2022 Fulbright award to teach English in Taiwan.

Demitra E. Papakostas 21C of Dallas, Texas, who majored mathematics and computer science and minored in East Asian studies, received a 2021–2022 Fulbright award to teach English in Taiwan.

Kaleb T. Roderick 21C of Smyrna, Tenn., who majored in Spanish and linguistics, received a 2021–2022 Fulbright award to teach English in Brazil.

Yazmina A. Sarieh 18Ox 20C of Nashville, Tenn., was named a Luce Scholar for 2021–22 by the Henry Luce Foundation. Scholars contribute their talents to NGOs, government agencies, private companies, universities, think tanks, and museums.

Piper E. Spooner 21C of Cincinnati, Ohio, who majored in Chinese studies, was selected as an alternate for the 2021–2022 Fulbright award to teach English in South Korea.

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E M O RY E V E RY W H E R E > > C L AS S NOT ES

Jesse L. Steinman 21C of Columbus, Ohio, who majored in history and German studies, received the Fulbright Community-Based Combined Award in History to develop an interreligious educational program about Graz, Austria Jewish history.

Rose K. Tehrani 19Ox 21C of Atlanta, who majored in biology and Spanish, received the 2021–2022 Fulbright award to each English in Spain.

Julie R. Wechsler 21C of Atlanta, who majored in psychology and linguistics, received a 2021–2022 Fulbright award to study the impact of a national registry of interpreters and translators of Indigenous languages in Peru.

Awa Youm 21PH of Lincoln, Neb., who earned an MPH in global health, received a public health research award to study reproductive coercion and gender-based violence in Mauritius.

IN MEMORIAM

40s Augustus Emmett Anderson Jr. 43Ox, of Ponte Vedra, Fla., on Feb. 1, 2021.

John Fort Codington 41C 42G, of Tallahassee, Fla., on Oct. 29, 2020.

William L. Crawley Jr. 49C, of Marietta, Ga., on Jan. 2, 2021.

C. Warner Crumb 46T, of Roanoke, Va., on Feb. 8, 2021.

James Terrell Davis 49B, of Decatur, Ga., on May 14, 2021.

David Dennis 48C, of Valdosta, Ga., on Dec. 9, 2020.

Robert M. Drake 48C, of Albany, Ga., on Jun. 11, 2018.

Roy G. Duncan 47C, of Marietta, Ga., on Mar. 13, 2021.

Thomas R. Freeman 39C 43M 47MR, of Savannah, Ga., on Feb. 17, 2021.

Bera B. Hardy 45G, of Auburn, Ala., on May 20, 2021.

Carol K. Himmelsteib 44G, of Cleveland, Ohio, in Dec. 2020.

J. Gene Hinson 49C, of Hiawassee, Ga., on Apr. 25, 2016.

Christine Houseal 42G, of Saint Helena Island, S.C., on Jul. 16, 2021.

Lucy C. Huie 39Ox 42G, of Athens, Ga., on Sep. 27, 2020.

Rudolph W. Jones Jr. 49MR, of Macon, Ga., on Jun. 16, 2021.

Frank J. Malone Jr. 47D, of Watkinsville, Ga., on Feb. 28, 2021.

Patricia Callahan Mason 49N, of Atlanta, on Jan. 21, 2020.

John R. Paddison 49B, of Savannah, Ga., on Aug. 1, 2021.

James W. Pate 46Ox, of Memphis, Tenn., on Jan. 31, 2021.

J. Griffin Patrick Jr. 49B, of McDonough, Ga., on Aug. 13, 2010.

Rutherford M. Poats 43C, of New York, N.Y., on Nov. 10, 2020.

Hugh Kenneth Pratt 48B, of Evans, Ga., on Apr. 28, 2021.

Homer S. Samuels 49D, of Brentwood, Tenn., of Aug. 18, 2021.

James H. Skelton 49C, of Saint Simons Island, Ga., on Mar. 14, 2021.

Carolyn B. Stephens 43N, of Lake Wales, Fla., on Feb. 5, 2021.

Morris Payne Webb Jr. 45Ox 48C, of Valdosta, Ga., on Aug. 6, 2021.

Robert E. Wells 46C 49M 49MR, of Rabun Gap, Ga., on Jun. 15, 2021.

Ruth L. Barclay 51G, of Charlottesville, Va., on May 5, 2021.

Barbara Van Ness Bell 59C, of Albany, Ga., on Apr. 27, 2021.

H. Stanley Benson Jr. 58D, of Columbus, Ga., on May 25, 2021.

Martha H. Blackwell 52N, of Jersey Village, Texas, on Nov. 29, 2020.

John C. Blalock Jr. 51C 56M, of Maitland, Fla., on Jan. 14, 2021.

William Neal Blanton Jr. 53T, of Newland, N.C., on Jan. 10, 2021.

Jacqueline Boles 59G, of Atlanta, on Dec. 6, 2020.

Laura Botschen 55T, of Fancy Gap, Va., on Jan. 3, 2021.

Walter W. Brandon Jr. 50Ox 52C 53G, of Huntsville, Ala., on Jul. 16, 2021.

Samuel A. Brodnax Jr. 52C, Miami, Fla., on Nov. 29, 2020.

Dorothy J. Brundage 68N, of Durham, N.C., on Nov. 15, 2020.

Jewell P. Bryant 52T, of Gloucester, Va., on Jan. 24, 2021.

Gary Wayne Buhl 58T, of Franklin, N.C., on Jun. 19, 2021.

John E. Bush 59D, of Smyrna, Ga., on May 16, 2021.

Thomas L. Butts Jr. 55T, of Monroeville, Ala., on Feb. 15, 2021.

DeArmond E. Canaday 50T, of Greenwood, S.C., on Dec. 4, 2020.

Asa G. Candler V 52C, of Atlanta, Ga., Aug. 13, 2021.

Frank Carrera III 57M, of Kennesaw, Ga., on Mar. 31, 2021.

Julia I. Carreras 56Ox, of Atlanta, on Jul. 4, 2021.

Kitty H. Chalker 59C, of Decatur, Ga., on Jan. 13, 2020.

Melvina G. Clark 59G, of Chattanooga, Tenn., on Jun. 19, 2021.

Edward M. Collins Jr. 57T, of Dallas, Texas, on Apr. 10, 2021.

John Franklin Cooke Jr. 53Ox 58C, of Mooresville, N.C., on May 8, 2021.

C. Robert Crow 53C 57M, of Urbana, Ill., on Jul. 2, 2021.

C. Warren Davidson 47Ox 49C 52M 53MR, of Avondale, Ga., on Aug. 2, 2017.

Frank Massey Davis 57C, of Savannah, Ga., on Aug. 7, 2021.

James B. Drew Jr., 59L, of Atlanta, on Dec. 3, 2020.

Stephen S. DeLisio 59C, of Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 7, 2021.

J. Walter Ellisor 59T, of Auburn, Ala., on Dec. 6, 2020.

Henry Candler Entreken Jr. 51C, of Saint Petersburg, Fla., on May 4, 2021.

Leon S. Eplan 50C, of Atlanta, on Apr. 15, 2021.

John Francis Flanagan 54M, of Lakeland, Fla., on Dec. 18, 2020.

James Voorhees Freeman Jr. 58C, of Gainesville, Fla., on May 19, 2021.

Moses N. Freeman 54D, of Pike Road, Ala., on Dec. 19, 2020.

Howard C. Friday 56M, of Jackson, Miss., on Apr. 22, 2021.

Justin Fuller, Jr. 58G, of Irondale, Ala., on Nov. 23, 2020.

James A. Gentry Jr. 54Ox 56B, of Snellville, Ga., on Feb. 27, 2021.

George W. Gilbert 55T, of Dothan, Ala., on May 20, 2021.

Charles M. Gilreath Sr. 50C 53L, of Cartersville, Ga., on Dec. 5, 2020.

Vickie E. Glenn 59C, of Lilburn, Ga., on Aug. 10, 2021.

Donald Goldman 52C, of Newport Beach, Calif., on Jan. 11, 2021.

Robert E. Gorday 55T, of Marietta, Ga., on Nov. 24, 2020.

James R. Green 59T, of Maryville, Tenn., on Dec. 15, 2020.

Harry P. Hall Jr. 51C 56L, of Canton, Ga., on Jan. 20, 2021.

Charles A. Hawkins 53B, of Senoia, Ga., on Dec. 26, 2020.

Robert E. Heck 52G, of Sardis, Ohio, on Jun. 9, 2021.

James Douglas Henry 50C, of Gainesville, Fla., on Nov. 22, 2020.

Peggy Lee Hina 58T, of Brevard, N.C., on Dec. 3, 2020.

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50s John L. Abbott 51B, of Stockbridge, Ga., on Jan. 5, 2021.

Floyd Addison 56Ox 58C, of Roanoke, Va., on Jul. 28, 2021.

Wiley A. Allgood Jr. 55Ox 57C, of Jacksonville, Fla, on Jan. 26, 2021.

James Armstrong 52T, of Casselberry, Fla., on Jul. 17, 2018.

WINTER 2021

James D. Hodnett 47C 50M, of Atlanta, on Mar. 19, 2021.

Stewart C. Howard 55G, of Charleston, Tenn., on Nov. 4, 2020.

William W. Huffman 54T, of Colville, Wash., on Jul. 4, 2021.

Mary Pence Irby 53G, of Macon, Ga., on Dec. 9, 2020.

Herbert A. Iserman Sr. 52D, of Jensen Beach, Fla., on Jan. 17, 2021.

Allen Nathaniel Jelks Sr. 52C, of Panama City, Fla., on May 24, 2021.

Emmie Carlton Johnson 50G, of Oxford, Ga., on Nov. 30, 2020.

Ronald G. Jones 55C 57G, of Atlanta, on Apr. 15, 2021.

William G. Jordan 53B, of Leesburg, Va., on Mar. 11, 2021.

John M. Kays 56C, of Silver Spring, Md., on Aug. 26, 2020.

Dan B. Kelly 52T, of Powell, Tenn., on Jul. 24, 2021.

Roman R. Kent 52C, of New York, N.Y., on May 21, 2021.

Harry L. Keith 53C, of Wilmington, N.C., on Jan. 10, 2017.

Robert E. King 56C 59M, of Green Mountain, N.C. on Mar. 20, 2021.

James A. Klaas 57B 58B, of Snellville, Ga., on Nov. 5, 2020.

Teruo Kobayashi 57G, of Elmira, N.Y., on May 28, 2021.

Sid Malvin Kresses 59L, of Atlanta, on Mar. 21, 2021.

Brooks W. Lansing Sr. 54B, of Dahlonega, Ga., on Sep. 28, 2020.

Dorothy A. Lindquist 57Ox, of Port Orchard, Wash., on Apr. 25, 2021.

Karl A. Lozier Jr. 57D, of Lake Worth, Fla., on Nov. 2, 2020.

Ray E. Marchman 55C, of New York, N.Y., on Jun. 6, 2021.

Ann F. Martin 52N, of Boone, N.C., on Feb. 26, 2021.

Dan A. Martin 45M 52MR, of Lawrenceville, Ga., on Jan. 3, 1991.

Robert C. Mathews III 53B, of Danville, Ill., on May 2, 2021.

Marilyn A. May 58C, of Ellijay, Ga., on Feb. 11, 2021.

EMORY MAGAZINE

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